Seven in the morning, and rswfire was already making his bed. He noted the oddity of it out loud — he had never made a bed in his life, had always considered it pointless labor against a thing you were only going to unmake by nightfall — and then noted, equally plainly, that it was nice when he did. The bed in question sat in an alcove formed by a slide-out that had been retracted and non-functional for eight months. The sidewall was right there, close enough to touch. His tablet was velcroed to the slide window, a window that faced no outside at all. This was the frame he chose to show first, and he showed it the way a person shows something they like.
He had learned the day before that the volunteers were talking about him. Not maliciously — the gossip ran toward repair. They had been discussing the broken slide, and the bed platform that was shorter than his body, and among themselves they had been working the problem. rswfire registered this without heat: they'll never understand me, he said, because I'm not like most people. His friend John, volunteering at another park, had been proposing fixes for the slide for some time before finally understanding that rswfire preferred it in. So he walked through the reasoning again, on camera, for whoever was listening. Extended, the slide throws weight to one side. The tires begin to lose pressure. The rig feels unstable even with the stabilizers down. And every extension and retraction demands that the entire interior be reconfigured — everything moved, everything moved back. He said he didn't understand why people do this to themselves, and that he wasn't interested in doing it.
Then came the part that reframed the whole thing: when the slide broke, he discovered what the break had given him. Above the retracted slide, between its roof and the roof of the RV, there was a void — a long empty volume that had been unavailable to him when the slide worked. Storage had been his standing constraint. The break dissolved it. He called the alcove his little alcove, said he thinks of it as Navy barracks, said he thinks of himself as being in a submarine. He said it was very comfortable.
The remaining friction he named without alarm and without resolving. Three bed toppers instead of a mattress; his back hurts a little every day; stretching would probably address it and he hasn't integrated stretching yet, though he'd like to. He had reasoned that children's mattresses might be shorter, since children are shorter, and had asked his mother, who told him they are all the same size. Someone had since mentioned a shorter bed existing, so he intended to go look, because he bet they made them — a box spring and mattress, kid-sized, set right into the alcove, and then a normal bed setup. In the meantime he sleeps at an angle, which gives him enough room. Layered onto that: fresh piercings in his ear and his eyebrow, which rule out both sides, so for now he sleeps on his back. A lot of different things happening all at once, he said, and moved on.
It was in that motion that the definitional work surfaced. He said his whole life's philosophy is adaptation, and that he had only realized this morning — in conversation with AI — that he means something different by the word than other people do. Most people mean comfort, he said, comfort and the reduction of friction. What he means is removing anything inefficient and rolling with it. He said he rolls with everything, that he never experiences it as a problem, that he sees it as a challenge and embraces it, that knowing he can adapt to anything is one of his core strengths and matters to him. So this is not a problem to solve. Most people, he said, are always trying to solve problems for him that are not actually problems. Eight months in, the slide is not an interim condition. This is how he lives.
The day before, in the rain, he had walked the half mile to the lake with a man behind him. He looked back twice. At the lake he sat on the dune gate with his music on and waited, because he knew the man would come out. The man walked nearly to the docks, saw him, pivoted, and started across — a football field's worth of ground, closing. rswfire watched him come and said out loud, oh, we're actually doing this, because he couldn't believe it. He offered a peace sign; the man barely acknowledged it, and seemed troubled by having been acknowledged at all. rswfire took out his earbuds and said hello, ready for a conversation, curious who this was. The man squeaked out the tiniest little hi and kept walking, on toward the dunes. That was the whole encounter. He was still turning it over a day later. That was wild to me, he said.
There was a lot to do — the last day of volunteer work for the week, then a couple of days off. And a hypothesis had arrived: the sinus trouble had run since January, and every park he had volunteered at during that stretch had been in the dunes region. Something blooms here in winter. He wondered whether leaving the area would end it, and said he was very curious to find out. He came to the coast and fell in love with the ocean, and the trees are trying to kill him, which he called messed up. Maybe it's only the dunes. Maybe he'd get lucky — he didn't plan to come back here anyway. It's going to be fun, he said, and he couldn't wait to get started.