He is recording inside the RV, and the first thing he does is revoke something. A man he met left song lyrics in the comments of one of his videos, and rswfire states that with that act the man has lost the right to any privacy from him. The camera is close. The interior is the same interior where it happened. He gestures to the seating area — right here — and the space becomes both the scene and the evidence.
It had begun soft. The two of them on that seat, cuddling, a movie running, and the man saying that no one had ever held him before, that he was always the one doing the holding. rswfire describes letting him process it, giving him room, because that is a big thing for a person to say out loud. That was the shape of the evening: openness extended, weight received, a movie going in the background of somebody's first experience of being held.
Then the register changed. The man moved from his own life to skyscrapers — that they were never built, that giants explain them, that he has done the research and is out there doing the research still. rswfire describes running the claim against direct evidence in real time: you can literally watch us building them. The conspiracies kept arriving, one after another, and underneath them the man's account of his own intelligence kept inflating. rswfire says the shift landed somatically before it landed in language — something just shifts — and what it told him was that he needed this man out of the RV.
He names the calculation plainly. Crazy is a little scary, he says, and he has dealt with crazy before, so the question was not whether to end it but how to end it from inside a vehicle with one door. The conversation kept escalating until rswfire put it directly: it sounds like you're saying I'm an idiot. The man agreed — that he was an idiot, that society had brainwashed him — and said it in a tone rswfire describes as aggressive, the tone that told him this is not a safe person to be around. rswfire notes what he is, sitting there being told this: a man who has been programming since sixth grade, living in an RV. And he notes where his attention had gone. His pocket knife, right next to him. Not knowing where this was going.
The man broke it himself. I think I should go. rswfire answered good idea. There was the awkward choreography of leaving an RV — gathering things, the narrow geometry — and rswfire went up and opened the door completely wide open, which was its own statement. At the threshold the man turned back and asked whether they could talk about it tomorrow. rswfire had already been scared to death by then, and he did not soften it: I don't know, I guess we'll find out tomorrow, but I need you to go right now. The man started to speak. rswfire repeated it — I've said my truth, I need you to go right now — and said nothing else. The man looked him in the eyes and told him that because of that look, they would not be talking tomorrow. Then he left, and rswfire slammed the door and locked it.
The rest of the night he spent awake with the question of whether the man would come back — to harm him, or to damage his things. The geography does not release him. The man lives on this cape too. rswfire states he cannot exactly escape him and does not have the money to move campsites, so the situation is not closed but adjacent, a whole situation to deal with now. Around three or four in the morning the texts came. He cannot even remember what the man said. He remembers what he said back: come near me or do anything and I call the police. You violated the trust between us. You made me feel unsafe in my own home.
What came back was a counter-frame, and rswfire refuses it in the telling. The man said he was just being himself and that rswfire had a fear response to that. He said rswfire had been making fun of him for picking berries on the trail — when, rswfire says, he had thought that was adorable. Everything twisted, turned back around. And then, after all of it, the man's answer arrived as song lyrics under a video. rswfire closes on the accounting: I gave this man my heart openly, and he responds with some stupid song lyrics, like that's ever going to be enough. It is not.