The sun had not come up yet. rswfire was still in bed, still inside the vehicle, still in the same spot he had pulled into on November 30th — and that date was the problem. He looked at the calendar and did the arithmetic twice. Nine days. He would have sworn it was six. Six was the number he had been carrying around in his head, the number that made the stationary interval feel proportionate. Nine was something else. That's too many days. Like that's really too many days. He said it out loud to no one and to the camera at once, half-laughing at the discrepancy, because there was no explanation for where the other three days went except that they had passed while he was healing in them.
He named the cause without softening it: two months of hiking on an injured muscle. He could have stopped for a day or two at the start and been fine. He didn't, and the bill arrived as nine days flat on his back. I learned my lesson. I've learned it. And then, almost as an aside, a new item — his chest hurt this morning, something he woke up with, something that seemed to trigger when he laughed. He didn't chase it. He logged it and moved on, filing it alongside the general cost of nine days horizontal in a bed.
The plan was already assembled before the light. Half an hour until sunrise. Shower first, then walk out to Cape Edge and look at the ocean. That was the whole ambition, and he stated the constraint on it plainly: every time he went out there he did too much, and the pain came, and the recovery slid backward, and six days became nine by a mechanism he still couldn't fully account for. So — the ocean, and only the ocean. Take it easy. He also said, in the same breath, that he was ready to be back out there, that he missed it, that there was nothing he'd rather be doing. Both were true and he let them stand next to each other without resolving them.
The shower was in the handicap bathroom, the only one on site with an actual shower, and afterward he stood at its mirror doing the work. Moisturizer on the face. Something for under the eyes, because he was 47 and that part mattered now. He offered the advice outward, to whoever was watching — even if you're a straight man, put some moisturizer on your face, you'll thank me — and folded in the regret that he hadn't started earlier, that he'd never needed it before and now wished he had the decades back. Then the gray hairs caught him and the whole register shifted into mock outrage: that's not happening, that's not allowed, body get it together, I'm feeding you well. He located the offending patch, considered shaving it, and pronounced the situation unacceptable. He also said, twice and without hedging, that he looked good. Both of those were true too.
Then the fragrance. Obsession — and the correction that one of the two bottles was the women's version, bought by accident, discovered after the fact, and kept. He mixed them. That was the signature now, male and female together, and his position on the matter was that he loved how both of them smelled and no one had standing to object.
Back outside the mirror, the inventory continued in the same operational key. No more Mountain Dew — he held up the Pepsi as evidence that he hadn't been kidding, conceded it was not that much better but insisted it was better. Water, a lot of it. The electrolyte packets had run out and that was a genuine loss; he'd found they worked for him, salt water worked for him, and he needed to think through how to get them back into the rotation. Then the town run: vape cartridges, and oil for the Jeep, because he hadn't been able to change it and suspected it was running low. He would add oil as a preventative measure. Skin, hydration, muscle, electrolytes, engine oil — all of it tracked the same way, all of it maintenance on systems that had to carry load again soon.
He was going into town first, then coming back, then heading out to the ocean for a little while. He felt pretty good, which meant he wanted to push, which meant he'd try to be careful. He said all three parts of that sentence in order, aware of the tension in it. Then he closed the way he closes, addressed outward past the lens: it may be a simulated reality but it's a constructed one — it has purpose, it has meaning. Make today one of the best days of your life. And the sun still wasn't up, but it was close, and the day had already started.