The day before, rswfire drove Bailey to the animal shelter and left him there. He states he was in shock a little. He did not go home right away — he went to the beach, and he processed it there, on the December coast, before turning back toward the RV.
What happened when he returned was not planned. He cleaned one of the exterior storage bays, a task he states he had needed to do for months. He threw out the litter box. He swept the floor. He cleaned the bathroom. He completely rearranged the bedroom area. Each of these had been sitting undone through months of intention, and all of them fell in a single afternoon, one into the next, without effort he can account for. He asked why now. The answer he was given — that the energetic space in the RV was different — was one he had not considered as a possibility. He states he did not know a person could get stuck from something like that. He notes he is still processing what it means.
At some point in that same day the crying arrived. He made a clip of it and set it aside to append at the end.
He woke at 2:00 in the morning, cold, unsure whether the heater had been running. He did not go back to sleep. He put the desktop back together. He strapped the monitor down in the living area, where it now doubles as a television — he had been watching Safe House from that spot, and confirmed it works. He repaired the keyboard, bagging the keys that had come loose. He set up new speakers. He weighed the PlayStation and found it close to pointless beside the Alienware desktop, likely going. He fit his clothing containers, found a third would not fit, and accepted that as the cost of the space he needed. The laundry bag went up into the overhead cab, which freed room for the shower bag and for the supplies that had lived on the floor. He notes he had the door open the day before and did not have to think about it. Small space, he says. Every inch counts.
He is direct about what the space had been holding. Bailey running, jumping, knocking things over. The litter box, the thing he hated most. The constant asking — to go outside, for attention rswfire states he did not feel he had to give. He describes not being able to accept the cat's love, which he names as pure, because of how frustrated he was with the situation, and states that Bailey deserved better than that after ten years. He spent six months on the question of how to fix it, how to make it better, and states there was no solution he could come up with that felt right. So he kept dealing with it, and that, he now sees, was load-bearing on how he lived in the space. Now he is claiming it, adapting it again to how he wants to live. He says he does not even know what to make of that.
By 6:30 the room was rebuilt and the rest of the day was open. He is thinking about going to the piercer — she opens later on a Saturday but should be there. The plan is hoops on one side, studs on the other; he touches the top two, notes they are still a little sensitive, decides it is what it is and that he will monitor them and put the studs back in if they worsen. Maybe more piercings in that area, not necessarily in a row. Eventually the eyebrow, which he has been thinking about for months and wants to see on himself first. He decides what he is going to do. His core muscles have gone days without pain now, except on longer hikes. It is almost 2025. Volunteering for the park system is about to begin, the freelance business is in motion, and he says he does not know where any of it leads.
Then, after everything was set up, sadness arrived again, and he identified it: guilt for feeling happy. He states you own it — you do not try to change it or suppress it, you acknowledge what it is, and that is what integration looks like. The clip he appended is the one from the day before. In it he says he loves that cat a lot, that he needs Bailey to have a good life, that he needs to know he will be all right, and that looking at that directly is very hard — including the call he will have to make to check, and what he might learn either way. He raised him from birth. He tried for six months. He states that if he went and brought him back it would be the same thing. There was no easy answer to this one, so he is going to feel his feelings, and he wants it seen. He owns it. He names that sovereignty.