The rain had been falling long enough that Eel Lake had turned into a surface that held light rather than reflected it, and rswfire stood at the edge of the dock at William M. Tugman State Park watching it happen. He said it out loud into the phone — that it was the most beautiful he had ever seen it, that he had never seen it so beautiful — and then said it again, as if the repetition were part of the observation rather than a failure of it. Something about the rain. It was near dusk. Darkness was coming, and the water was doing something with the last of the light that he wanted someone else to see.
He turned the camera toward the far shore and began mapping. There was a trail over there he used to take a lot, but the river feeding the lake had come up high enough that the path was unreachable — flooded, he said, testing the word and keeping it. It ran over to a particular tree. There was another trail on this side that climbed and circled the lake, past a park bench somewhere out there, and if you kept walking you would reach the state park boundary, and past that the trail continued, unmarked, going a distance he did not know because he had never followed it to the end. In January, when Tugman was the first place he volunteered, his core muscles were still healing and he never made it as far as he wanted. He named that as a disappointment at the time, and named alongside it the worry that the muscles might not heal at all.
They had. He described noticing, maybe a week ago, that he was no longer thinking about them — and that the absence of the thought was the marker, the way recovery announces itself by going quiet. Not entirely, he clarified. Every once in a while his side still hurt. But so much better, and it had been a slow process, and he was happy about it. He said he intended to walk that unmarked trail now, finally, to the place where he'd find out how far it goes.
The screen was fogging. He said so, apologized in advance in case it was the video and not just the phone, and then set the apology aside with something that functioned as a standing agreement between him and whoever was watching: when he records, it is never perfect, and it is more about what he is saying than what is being seen. He had spent the day with a friend watching Star Trek, and he marked that as its own event — a year of not being able to sit still for television or a book or a video game, his mind wanting to engage other things, and then an afternoon where he could.
Then he named what the night was for. He was processing. He said it plainly, more than once, and located the mechanism precisely: movement is how he processes emotion, and his emotions are layered. Disappointment. Some sadness. He had liked volunteering for these parks. He loved these parks. And they had rejected him over what happened — over conduct he described as so wrong, in a system that would protect people who say things like eat glass to a volunteer. He had been bullied and mistreated for two months, he said, and had been hopeful that the last person in the chain of command would stand up for him, and she did not. What he was processing now, he said, was grief: he had detached from the state park system, and he was standing on its dock as a visitor, knowing they reject him.
He kept turning the harder question over while the light went. Ultimately he would have to let it go, he said, because he does not stay stuck — that is not how he works. But that was exactly the place the processing kept catching. He admitted he did not know whether it was worth the energy to hold them accountable, and then immediately identified that thought as the mechanism itself: a lot of us think that way, a lot of us just let things go, and then nothing changes. Somebody has to stand up and do something. He asked why there is no accountability in this world, why people are so shallow, and left the questions where they landed. He mentioned that he had stopped posting to YouTube for three months while volunteering because he had not yet worked out where to draw that line, and that they used a video as an excuse to let him go — a video he only made after they had already dismissed him. Absurd, he said, when you really stop and think about what they did.
This was the dock he had come to all month in January, day and night, a known position for stargazing when the sky is clear. There was a marine layer tonight; he thought he might check anyway. He said he had a lot of thinking to do and a lot of plans to make, and that he did not know what he was doing next, but he would figure it out, and whoever was watching would find out when he did. Then he closed the way he said he always closes: he is fine, he mostly says he's fine, that's just how he works, he is fine even if it doesn't seem like it. He wanted people to see what it looks like. He wanted them to see something real. Behind him, the rain kept landing on the lake, and it was going to be dark soon.