Snowbirds, part fourteen.
(I originally wrote this on our last day at the RV camp, but never posted it because of what would happen the next day...)
It might not have been the most extravagant of setups, but we loved our little home. As long as we could still cuddle and watch movies with a fan on us, I was happy...
So, we spent the last month at an RV park in Spring Hill. Today is our last day here. We hoped the whole Coronapocalypse would be over by the time we got to this day, but it obviously isn't, and at this point I am sincerely convinced that this is the beginning of the end--there's certainly no end in sight. I have significant doubts that we will ever return to the state of oppression most of us had learned to tolerate, and things are only going to get worse from this point forward, especially since this whole situation has proven to be incredibly advantageous to the powers that be: we're all aggressively and unquestioningly policing ourselves and each other while being policed even more heavily by the actual police, more laws are being passed quietly or under the guise of public safety, all the main corporations who own this country are doing just fine while independent businesses gradually disappear, and the stock market has done the best it has since the Great Depression. I can't stop thinking about all of the things I didn't get to do, and now I can't even travel the country one last time since most of it is shut down. I wish I had a home to go back to.
Most of the past month, for me, was spent either doing DoorDash deliveries, scratching myself, or both at the same time. For three weeks, I spent just about every night, between 6PM and 3AM, delivering disgusting food to people, at first just to get some relief from the humidity and the bugs biting me, but also in hopes of saving up a nice little nest egg for whatever future Alyssa and I chose together. It usually took the entire nine hours just to break $100, which was my personal goal for each night, although the average driver typically made about $20+ an hour. The area we were in just wasn't the best. The first $500 of it immediately went toward Alyssa's car insurance for the first half of this year, an obvious but devastating necessity, and after that we were able to accumulate and put away a little over $1,000 just for gas and emergencies as we both waited for our Trump checks to come in. (Any and all liberals reading this: feel free to send yours to me and Alyssa if you don't wanna take any of that blood money from him!) It was also important to me that Alyssa had money in her bank account so she'd never feel financially dependent on me or like she didn't have the means to leave if she ever wanted to. This was the first time in years that she didn't have any savings of her own and wasn't at all employed, and because I was using her DoorDash account to work, every penny I made was already being automatically deposited to her account.
The nights were pretty uneventful. I became very acquainted with the area and started to subsist partially off of the worst vegan options fast food had to offer. I listened to music a lot and spent way too much time in my own head as I drove down dark roads, going over every horrible thing that has ever happened since I was born. For the most part, orders were consistent, but usually small $6-8 ones where the DoorDash base pay would be like $2-3 and the person would maybe add a $3 tip if I was lucky. Spring Hill wasn't really a proper city, so it was to be expected. I watched the sun set every day over a long strip of chain eateries along Cortez while loitering at the Circle K or Wawa in between orders, drinking an 85-cent fountain drink and reading. A lot of people selected 'no contact' for their orders, so I thankfully didn't have to interact with many people and just had to leave their food outside their doors. There was a McDonald's rush almost every night between 1 and 3 where I'd get several consecutive orders for $3-5 delivering absurd combinations of food to young rich slobs who usually didn't tip. I lost count of how many times I had to deliver 40 chicken McNuggets to someone. I struck up a friendly relationship with the poor older woman who had to work overnight there. She was very vocal with me about her disgust for the people who ordered from there and her general hatred for her job.
"Why don't they go the fuck home and eat something normal for a change?!" she complained out loud to me.
One night, she told me someone ordered 38 cheeseburgers. Another night, I watched a young white trash couple, both in denim jeans and white shirts, wait patiently in the drive-thru line on foot between a line of cars, and then act outraged and surprised when they were told they couldn't do it through the speaker. The man went as far as asking to speak to the manager, who obviously repeated that they couldn't do it for liability reasons, and he at first tried to say he was on a bike when she said they could only take orders from people in cars. They stormed off in a huff about it. It was an unsettling reminder that people not only still ate there, but with a passionate regularity. The people who ordered McDonald's were most likely to live less than a mile away from it; people who ordered Chipotle or Taco Bell seldom tipped; people who ordered big dinners from Applebee's and Chili's normally tipped really well. One time, someone tipped me a quarter for their late-night delivery of McDondald's. Another, someone tipped me fifty cents. It was worse than not tipping at all, I felt; like way more of a 'fuck you' than a simple disregard for me as a service worker. I also had to deliver several times down a long, dark, dirt road far outside of town, to a perpetually shirtless teenager with long, greasy, blond hair whose account name was Dickbaginton. He not once tipped, and was one of the few people to hit me up because I wasn't getting to him fast enough.
I was always at the mercy of the establishments I was picking up from, of course. So if my first stop was a local pizza place that told me there was a 45-minute wait, I just had to sit there and wait. If DoorDash sent me another order during that time, I'd accept it, but the app wouldn't let me get and deliver it until I finished the first one, so I still just had to wait around and not make money for an hour and a half. The small orders people made drove me the craziest, like a Taco Bell order of one cinnamon twist and two Baja Blast Freezes, for which the app paid me $3 and the two 12-year-olds who'd ordered it tipped me $2 in cash. Then there was the app itself, or in conjunction with my awful service provider, constantly fucking me over. I'd get a text saying there was an incoming order, but the order would never appear in the actual app, leaving me helpless until I got a follow-up text informing me I had missed a delivery opportunity. This would reduce my order acceptance rate, which would in turn reduce the number of orders sent my way. One night, I was at a Chili's and the waitress said to me, "There are, like, ten DoorDash orders in there right now. I shouldn't have come to work, I shoulda just dashed tonight!" It was sad to think so many of these minimum-wage workers at the chains I picked up from were also having to supplement their income with this stupid app. There would be entire nights of one solitary order at a time, taking me 15 minutes or further outside of town to the many six-figure designer home cul-de-sacs, for a couple bucks and almost never any tip from these rich fucks. At best, they'd say in the order notes that they'd be tipping in cash and then they just... wouldn't. One time, I delivered Chinese food to one of the biggest mansions I'd ever seen, surrounded in a tall fence with two gates requiring key code entries to open, outdoor speakers playing classical music, and an entire knight stood up near the entry doors. Those people tipped me $3. Those moments were particularly soul-crushing.
Otherwise, I just tried to find entertainment in the little things I'd see on my drives, mostly signs of the ultra-conservative life around me. People held up signs at intersections there a lot, I noticed, mostly right-leaning nonsense. People hung out in parking lots a lot, too: groups of motorcyclists and bros with shiny muscle cars stood around by the Wawa or across the street by the abandoned Sears, while entire families sat in foldout chairs like they were on a blacktop gravel beach until sundown. Spring Hill was one of the most heavily policed areas I'd ever seen; one out of every five cars was a cop, and I'd see between one and six of them at a time hanging out in the shadows of every shopping plaza, school, and any other vacant lot I'd drive by. There were a lot of car accidents and a small homeless population, but I could not figure out why it was on such heavy lockdown. For a job that was relatively easy, where I made my own schedule and had some bit of control over what I did and did not do, it was still very dehumanizing. By the time I'd get home, Alyssa would be fast asleep. We stopped having sex entirely that final month because I just felt far too uncomfortable always being itchy, sweaty, and covered in layers of dirt and medicated topical ointments. I started jerking off in my car before heading home each night. I felt like I had some hobo version of the miserable lives all my married and wage-slaved peers had.
A very Florida DoorDash experience.
Alyssa lived an entirely different life in our camper, just relaxing and fiddling with her many talents and creative endeavors, working on her drawings and adding parts to the epic saxophone piece she had been working on since before we even left town, teaching herself new skills like stick-and-poke tattooing using a DIY kit I got her for her birthday and some spare fruit. She was always full of ideas and curiosities, which I admired. One day, she would just wake up and decide she wanted to see if she could encase a tiny dinosaur I found in a pretty resin cube. Stuff like that. I envied her drive to want to create and pursue projects, and mourned the loss of those in me, but those urges just weren't in me anymore since the cancellation. It became enough for me to help support her own and try to facilitate a life for her where she didn't have to worry about survival and could just focus on those things, so I went out every night to work and make money for us while she stayed behind at the camper and wrote, drew, practiced saxophone, and talked to other people online. I always would tell her I wanted her to be famous, and deserved to be, and encouraged her to make new friends online even though I no longer had any interest in meeting new people are getting close to anyone who wasn't her or Tia. I desperately didn't want her life to be over just because mine was, and I hoped I could make those two conflicting realities coexist peacefully and happily. I was constantly checking in, asking her if she was happy, having fun, still in love with me, didn't want to go home. Every time, she gave me a smile and assured me she was. Part of me wished she wasn't doing so well so I wouldn't feel so alone just so I didn't feel so alone in my misery, but I was also relieved that she wasn't losing her mind the way I was. It gave me meaning that I didn't otherwise have to be this partner who was taking care of things and maintaining a nest for us to live in. Everything else I had to live for and find fulfillment had been taken from me, so I put my all into the two most important things left in my life: Alyssa and the camper. All that was left for me was to be a perfect boyfriend.
The only real downside to spending the month at the RV park for me, though, was that I quickly realized it was a hot spot for no-see-ums (also known as biting midges, or sand flies), likely because we were near the swimming pool and/or because the park was located on a pond. Bugs fucking loved me for some reason, which sucked because I had very intense reactions to bug bites, whether they be from fleas or mosquitoes or bedbugs. At that point in my life, I feel I'd spent a good majority of it scratching myself, and I was covered in scars from it. I'd had to go through scabies and folliculitis several times, hives, lice, fleas, bedbugs, allergic reactions to random plants, and would always get devoured if I was anywhere near mosquitoes. I didn't handle it well. A bug bite for me usually resulted in a bigger, more inflamed bump than was typical, with an especially severe itchiness, far worse than for most people I knew. On my own personal scale of suffering, the bites of no-see-ums lay somewhere between a mosquito bite (which were usually pretty big on me and could be itchy nonstop for upwards of two weeks) and a bedbug bite (which almost immediately formed hard welts that itched enough to drive any person insane). No-see-ums were almost invisible to the naked eye, being as small as a crumb, but their bites hurt on impact and provoked some of the worst itchiness I'd experienced in my entire life. As some healed, they just got replaced with new ones. One night, I cried over it, because I had been itchy for days on end, unable to sleep through an entire night, and there were times where there were no bugs anywhere to be found in our camper as I literally watched new bites materialize in clusters on my legs. The injuries I left behind trying to relieve the itch were preferable to the itch, but still painful since I was usually seriously damaging my flesh, grinding and scratching away at them with Velcro, open scissors, knives, bottle caps--really whatever I could find. Soon, the itch of a healing injury replaced the original itch of the bite. It was a vicious cycle.
Cutter sprays not only made me feel oily and disgusting, and burned my skin since I was covering myself in poison, but they also didn't seem to deter bugs from biting me. For this trip, since I had gone through my two bottles of Rad Soap bug spray (which actually worked quite well) and the homemade concoction Colleen made for me, I picked up a big bottle of Quantum Health Buzz Away Extreme from Whole Foods, which was the only vegan brand they had and was made from all-natural, non-DEET ingredients. This spray had done nothing for me. I practically bathed myself in it and would moments later sit and watch a mosquito land right on me. I found a YouTube video by some hunter guy suggesting a mixture of plain Listerine, witch hazel, and tea tree oil, so I went out and got that stuff with a spray bottle and covered the entire interior of the camper, as well as my body with it. It seemed to work at first, but clearly hadn't in the long-term. We also set out a trap of apple cider vinegar and dish soap--usually intended for fruit flies, but alleged to work on no-see-ums, too--and after a couple days the bowl had caught exactly zero bugs of any kind. So there didn't seem to be any way to repel these fuckers. Usually for mosquito bites, I used some medicated Benadryl anti-itch gel. This worked for no more than 15 minutes at a time for me when it came to these bites, and I knew I could make things worse if I basically overdosed on this topical medication like I had in the past with bedbug bites. So I tried maximum strength Cortizone 10 cream with aloe, whose bottle claimed it lasted for ten hours. It lasted longer than the Benadryl gel, for about an hour or so, but nowhere near the ten advertised, and it only really worked if I put enough on my skin to lather up like soap. I tried putting witch hazel directly on the bites, but that did nothing. Sometimes, in an attempt to avoid further hurting myself, I'd slap the bite instead of scratch it, which momentarily helped but not for long. Showers in hot or cold water, and the heat of the sun, both sent the bites into a tingling like being pricked with a buncha little needles that I could hardly handle.
So it had been a pretty uncomfortable three weeks for me. I'd toughed it out and only cried once. I oftentimes was covered in scabs, sores, and dried blood, or friction burn from rubbing away at bites near my ankles with my sneakers. Every night, I'd wake up several times to having to scratch, or feel a phantom tickling that seemed like a bug was on me when there wasn't. I constantly felt like I was covered in bugs. Alyssa remained mostly unscathed, even though she regularly hung around partially naked.
War wounds. The bugs won.
Another big part of our routine was cooking dinner once a day, which we split responsibility for, and was one of the only fun or fulfilling things I did each day. Being and staying vegan was easy, of course, even when camping full-time and relying on food stamps. A lot of what we ate came from local dumpsters that I'd stop by during or after work each night. Below are some of the meals we made...
Dumpster bowl filled with steamed cabbage, seasoned tiny potatoes, slices of avocado, roasted cauliflower, and barbecue caramelized onions! This entire meal came from the trash.
Spaghetti with chickpeas, peppers, and onions, topped in nooch, crushed red pepper flakes, and Newman's Own sockarooni sauce! The spaghetti, peppers, and onions were all from the trash.
A big bowl of potato salad made with petite potatoes from a dumpster, celery, carrot, onion, Hellmann's vegan mayo, dijon and spicy brown mustard, apple cider vinegar, and seasonings, to go along with our Field Roast burgers. We ate at the little kitchen table at the pavilion, which was nice.
Just some sad burgers.
Red curry tofu with carrot, red pepper, and mushrooms!
Big veggie pita bowls. The pita bread couldn't be opened into pockets, we found out, so we just sandwiched them, cut them in half, and threw them in bowls with a side of goddess dressing. The pitas were lightly toasted, spread with Hope hummus, and stuffed with Boston lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, mushrooms, avocado, cucumber, grated carrot, onion, green onion, hamburger pickles, and dijon mustard. So good.
Burritos! These were filled with green pepper, onion, black beans, MorningStar ground beef with spices and seasonings, cheddar Daiya, Boston lettuce, avocado, green onion, and hot sauce.
Chicken fajitas, using Morningstar chicken strips, three different colors of peppers, jalapeño, onion, rice, and all the traditional seasonings and spices!
Sloppy joes and canned green beans. We used Morningstar ground beef and a can of Manwich sauce and spread some Hellmann's mayo on the Wonderbread buns. Their mayo tastes like paper by itself. I recently discovered that bagged frozen vegan meats like those from Morningstar will slowly fill up with water if they're inside a cooler of melting ice, so the ground beef was quite mushy. Thankfully, sloppy joes are supposed to be kinda mushy?
Dumpster spaghetti with bolognese made from Lightlife tempeh!
Toasted everything bagel sandwiches with Kite Hill cream cheese, avocado, cucumber, shredded carrot, pickles, and lettuce!
Big bowls of buffalo chicken salad! I kept seeing it on the Wendy's menu whenever I did deliveries, so I tried to make it myself with lettuce, cucumber, grated carrot, avocado, tomato, pickles, crispy onions, and Morningstar chicken patties fried without oil until crispy and cut into thin strips, with Frank's buffalo sauce and a dollop of mayo since I couldn't find ranch anywhere. This salad was way bigger and deeper than the picture shows, and it was fucking awesome.
Potatoes, asparagus, and barbecue baked black eyed peas!
Giant bowl of salad with tofu, sweet potato, mushrooms, carrot, cucumber, and avocado with ginger dressing!
Breakfast burritos with tofu scramble, peppers and onion, avocado, and Lightlife sausage!
Though a far cry from the forest we were originally staying in (and preferred), the RV park and city was not without plenty of wild critters to see, particularly cool bugs who wandered into our camper at night. Taking in and appreciating the other creatures we shared this dying planet with made everyday life a lot more magical and exciting to me. Driving around and doing DoorDash deliveries almost every night, I saw a lot of awful, ugly humans and human creations, and the beautiful, graceful, innocent non-human animals I'd see really balanced it all out, or so I liked to try and convince myself...
This lone parking lot peacock was strutting around outside their home at the Weeki Wachee Springs State Park. I pulled in to admire them and they immediately began to saunter toward me. I saw him out there almost daily, after 5 and before sunset.
The two hens we'd named Helen and Martha came over to our camper a lot. There was also little Roger, who would crow at 5:30 every morning even though he was too small for any of the ladies to take seriously. I loved watching him.
A gorgeous emerald moth came into our camper.
What I am pretty sure was a poplar borer beetle also kept coming into our camper, even though they were supposed to like trees. I had to bring them back outside three fucking times.
We had an armadillo neighbor again, this one even bigger than the one we'd seen back at Serenova Tract. It was hard to get pictures with their cute faces visible because they were busy burying their snout in the dirt.
One night, I heard loud slaps and rustling against the tarp outside the bunk end window, just inches from where my head lay. I shined the cellphone light through the screen and saw this tree frog climbing up it. They then jumped toward the light for some reason, sticking to the screen.
A lovely junebug visited us.
I was returning to the car with a delivery and caught this adorable treehopper near my window. I left them there and they eventually scattered up the window, clinging on effortlessly as I drove. Treehoppers are one of our absolute favorite insects, in large part because of how uniquely varied they are in size, shape, color, and physiology.
In the same parking lot, I saw this egret examining a green newspaper box very carefully. I thought they were really pretty, and never found out what they saw that was so alluring.
We'd slept in so many woods the last two months and had heard plenty of barred owls cackling like monkeys late at night, but I hadn't seen one up close until delivering to some random apartment complex. They eventually flew off because I got too close with my phone, using my car's high beams for lighting. Watching their impressive wing span open before they zoomed into the darkness of some trees was incredible.
Behind a strip mall, we saw a big group of crows and vultures hanging around a dumpster together, wearing all black and in the rain like a group of goths. It really warmed my heart.
An absolutely beautiful bright green orb weaver moved into our camper. We always welcomed the spiders as free pest control.
We also found a small brown gecko on our window one night.
On our last day, a green anole found their way inside the camper and scurried around until I helped guide them out through one of the screen windows, even though we both wanted him to live with us forever.
The big, bulky, BDSM-looking lubber grasshoppers took over the screen walls around the swimming pool.
We'd also seen a few black racer snakes who seemed to live in the bushes behind us. We'd caught them speedily climbing trees up after prey. It was totally amazing and caught us off-guard to see a snake climb up a tree, especially as fast as they apparently could. The other day on route 50, I saw a reddish snake crossing the street. 3. We had an entire bag of dumpstered apples sitting outside and squirrels gradually stole each one. We were both amazed at well they could pick these relatively huge apples up with just their mouths and still be able to climb and jump trees with the same amount of accuracy and agility. Earlier in the day, we could hear woodpeckers, and at night we heard owls. The other day, I helped an anole who had fallen into the swimming pool. I'd almost hit a few possums. While taking the tarp off the camper once a storm had finished, we found a brown recluse spider, who ran off and hid under the first leaf they could get under. Brown recluse spiders were genuinely reclusive, which was why most people would never get bitten by one, let alone see one up-close. Please don't kill bugs that you don't absolutely have to!
Toward the end of our stay, the lives of our wonderful chicken neighbors became something of our nightly responsibility. It all started late one night when we suddenly heard the frightened and strained screams of a member of the flock. It sounded horrific, and we both silently held our breath and listened, more than sure of what was happening: a critter had broken in and was trying to kill and eat someone. I went out with a flashlight and, sure enough, I caught a raccoon halfway up the tree with one of the ladies in their mitts and jaw. They froze and we stared at each other. I had no idea what to do, or even if I should do something. Was this the circle of life or whatever? Did it count as natural if the chickens being eaten by a legitimately wild animal had been forcibly and selectively bred into this world and were now being kept in an artificial, precarious situation on the property of an RV park? Was any of this fair to them? Could the natural forces of the wild world around them even be prevented? I still tried to help when I could, but we'd already lost one of them.
Another night, the threat was a family of possums who lived in the trees above them. Thankfully, the big hen acted as the rooster Roger couldn't be because of his size and was very loud and aggressive about keeping intruders out. I went out one night with my cellphone light and my squirt bottle of anti-no-see-um spray, ready to do whatever I could to get any potential murderers outta there. That night, I caught a tiny, young possum, frozen with glowing eyes, underneath all of the chickens as they perched on their individual spaces, all of them awake and looking paralyzed by fear. I sprayed and sprayed until the possum left. It was the best I could do. I'd hear yelling again, and run out just in time to see the hen beating a larger possum up, sending them scattering back up the tree from which they came. She was such a bad-ass. She did get a little tangled in the elastic fencing once, and I had to carefully and gently convince her I was there to help her get out of it. I stood around for a while, guarding the area along with her, as she strutted back and forth outside the coop, panting from exhaustion and her eyes fluttering open and closed from how tired she was, thrown off her nightly sleep schedule. I was so impressed by her and her dedication to her flock.
We'd tell the owners about it and they acted surprised and sad about it, but I wasn't sure what else they expected out of keeping this chicken coop outdoors in Florida without any predator deterrents. A few nights later, while I was out working, Alyssa would text me about scary noises coming from the coop again. We were both so frustrated that these chickens existed in the first place and had to endure the stress of their circumstances. She'd go out and find that a young raccoon had been caught in a trap left by the property owners. We debated letting them out, but weren't sure of what the right thing to do was, and ultimately left them there. They looked so sad and defeated. No more chickens lost their lives while we were there.
One night on my way to a DoorDash order, I saw two people in the road next to two tiny black dogs. As I always do, I slowed and asked them if everything was okay. The woman told me they saw these two dogs running loose in the middle of the thruway and were trying to catch them. I canceled my delivery and immediately pulled over to help. The two little pups had collars but no identifying information, and my general rule was that if a dog was found in that sort of situation it was likely because of shitty guardians. They weren't aggressive, but were skittish, and kept prancing off counterintuitively into the middle of the four-lane road. Thankfully, it was after midnight and traffic was limited. We lured them in with bits of chicken McNuggets the couple had in their car. After a couple minutes of hovering over them patiently, I grabbed one behind their ribs around their waist. She peed all over me and half-heartedly bit, but didn't even break my skin even though she easily could have. I cradled her and talked to her soothingly while petting her and she quickly realized I was a friend. Her brother, though, was not as trusting, and kept getting further away, barking but refusing to let his sister out of his sight. It took a half hour to get him. He ran out into a wide, open, dark grassy field, behind a building, into bushes, giving us only his barks to keep track of where he was. He wouldn't abandon his sister, but we had no intentions of separating them, anyway. I grabbed a blanket from the car and me and the woman started walking over to another parking lot where he had scurried off to.
As risky as it was, we decided she'd put the sister down, in hopes that she would lure him back to us. The pup started walking ahead of us, but kept stopping and looking at us, as if to ensure we were still following. I wondered if she could put in a good word for us to her brother. The brother let us all reunite with him and we were close again. I put the sheet down on the concrete and got down on their level, patting my hands on the blanket, which instigated them trying to play along with me, imitating my hands with their paws. As soon as I saw an opportunity, I grabbed the brother by their collar. He instantly flipped over onto his back as if to be accepting death, no barking, and I rubbed his belly a little before picking him up and wrapping him in my blanket while the woman held the sister. Every time I'd get ahead of his sister, he'd twist his neck around just to make sure he knew where she was. It was so sweet. The couple took them and would be taking care of the rest, ensuring they found homes and weren't separated. Mission accomplished.
Earlier, a cop and fire marshal had pulled over by my car, allegedly to make sure everything was okay. We explained what we were doing and they went on their way. By the time we had caught the other dog, the cop had returned, and was standing above us on the sidewalk, shining his flashlight and asking, "Did you get 'im?" We thought he was just checking on us, curious about the conclusion on what was probably another boring night for him, but nope. When the brother dog had started running off, too far for either of us to keep up, I turned my car around and drove further up the road just to get closer faster, driving against the traffic that wasn't there. The roads were dead, and every road in Florida had giant concrete medians requiring constant u-turns. I didn't waste my time doing that, and pulled over onto the grass by the shoulder, putting my hazards on. I was technically facing oncoming traffic, but was nowhere dangerous. After our prior interaction, I naively assumed the extenuating circumstances were understood and that all was well. But as soon as I climbed back up the bank to my car, the police officer barked at me, "Hold on one minute, sir! Can I talk to you?"
I was standing in my open door when I turned around, him cornering me. He asked if he could see my ID. I was in disbelief. As is routine for me, I asked him, "What for?"
He gave me the usual, "I just wanna know who I'm talking to."
I asked him why and if I was being detained.
Instead of answering my question directly, he repeated, "I just wanna know who I'm talking to," several more times.
This was all pretty typical to the process, in my experience. Then his nice guy attitude switched instantly and he sternly said, "Listen, if you wanna do it the hard way, I can write you all the tickets in the world right now!"
I knew he knew he could.
I said, "There it is! A threat to bend me to your will!"
He demanded I step away from my car and over toward his.
He kept referring to "my attitude", to which I told him I was just exercising my rights. I told him I knew he was "fishing", meaning he was checking me just on the off-chance that I had an outstanding warrant or any other reason he could arrest me. He scoffed, then tried to tell me I was parked "dangerously" where I was.
So I said, "Then let me go and I can move the car right now! If you are genuinely stopping me because of where my car is, because it's sooo dangerous, then let me get into it and drive off."
Of course, they didn't, because that wasn't why they were detaining me. Unfortunately for me, they had my technical traffic infraction as just cause in this moment.
The other officer stepped out of the vehicle and I told them both, "It's absolutely shameful and disgusting that I was just out here doing a good thing, that neither of you would have done, and you're going to exploit it as an opportunity to maybe make an arrest."
He again threatened me with tickets if I didn't shut up.
I asked him, "So this is 'bad cop' now, right?"
I told him it was absolutely terrifying how quickly and easily he changed his demeanor as soon as I didn't give him what he wanted.
He went into his car with my ID. I continued to berate the other cop, pointing out that they could have just as easily let me leave without an altercation.
"We're just following policy," he robotically tried to tell me.
"Oh, come on, you're cops! You can do whatever you want whenever you want!"
He just kept saying, "You're entitled to your opinion."
The guy came back out with my ID and for some reason then asked the other cop to check it, too.
I asked if my ID was okay and he told me he didn't have to answer any of my questions.
"You're a public servant, you absolutely have to answer my questions."
I told him that I had too much self-respect to just hand over my ID to every cop who asked me for it, and repeated how deplorable it was for him to be using this as an opportunity to maybe make an arrest. As they always do, he tried to tell me he was originally just going to look at it and let me go, and that he was trying to be kind with me.
"Kindness isn't conditional. You weren't being kind. You were asking me for my ID for no reason so you could check if I had any outstanding warrants and then threatened me with tickets as soon as I didn't bend to your will. That's not kindness."
In time, he admitted, "Listen, you have no idea how many people we pull over each night who have warrants out for their arrest--"
"See! You just confirmed exactly what I said you were doing!" I cut him off, exclaiming.
He somehow still denied that he had. I got my ID back, I went on my way, thankfully without any tickets. The cops both looked exhausted. Did I make that scenario harder for myself? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. I was tired of living in a police state and if I was going to be harassed by cops, I was going to put up a fight. Imagine seeing three people rescue two dogs. The one person has committed a minor infraction, but nothing dangerous and about to be fixed any second anyway. And your first thought is: 'I wonder if I can arrest this motherfucker right now.' Disgusting.
I thought about a few nights earlier when I ran out of gas right in the middle of a DoorDash delivery. A cop stopped and asked me what was going on and I told him I'd run out of gas. I told him I was going to have to ride my bike over a mile away to the nearest gas station and fill up water bottles from the trash with gasoline and ride back.
He told me, "Yeahhh, we aren't really supposed to escort people around..."
I asked, "You don't have a gas jug or anything in your car with you?"
He said no.
I said to him, "Cops should have things like that, so they can actually help people."
"Yeah, but we're just supposed to deal with criminal activity."
He drove off and, I kid you not, he immediately pulled someone over around the corner. Cops didn't exist to help us. They existed to make as many people into criminals as possible.
My last week or so at the RV park, I stopped doing deliveries, satisfied with what I had been able to raise. Between March and April, I'd technically made over $2,200, but after expenses I really only had a little over a grand to show for it all. I didn't have anything else to do with myself, though. I spent the days hanging out at the pavilion, enjoying refuge from the heat and the bugs who wanted to eat me, some of the time tediously moving my travelog entries from Facebook over to this LiveJournal, which took a while just because of having to resize and upload photos and then do the HTML for each entry. Another man hung out there every single day, practically all day, sitting in the reclining chair and channel-surfing, usually settling on reruns of old football games, though one time he very enthusiastically watched the second half of Big Momma's House 2. Alyssa would come in there to sit on one of the comfy couches to draw and we'd sometimes eat dinner at one of the long tables. After being on such different schedules, it was just nice to curl up together after dinner and put on a movie. One day, she told me she was happy to be able to see me more now that I'd taken a break from working, and it made me feel really good.
The one and only time I tried putting some of my own food into the freezer of the community fridge, someone ate my bag of Morningstar nuggets. I was glad someone ate vegan meat instead of real meat, but still pretty annoyed. A woman who we assumed was in some way associated with the man who hung out inside there sat in her car just as long and regularly, chainsmoking and watching things on her phone. Her young son would go in every now and then to hop around and watch cartoons, clearly trying to burn all the adolescent energy he couldn't put toward anything while living at an RV park. He was such a cutie. One day, unprovoked, he went out of his way to tell me, "It just feels nice to be nice! It feels good to be good!" He was a small glimmer of hope in a dark and unforgiving world that would likely beat these sentiments right out of him within the next couple of years. Some days, I'd just fall asleep on one of the couches with the box fan pointed at me. I hated not feeling comfortable enough to stay in my own camper, but it was what it was. During moments that I tried, I began playing my little Casio keyboard, just trying to write little songs for no reason in particular. I had daydreams of starting some sorta bedroom pop project with Alyssa one day, but after playing music around her a handful of times and her not once acknowledging me or what I was playing, I assumed I wasn't talented enough for her since I was a self-taught nobody and she was a classically trained saxophonist with a music degree who was very snobby about music in general.
Truthfully, I wasn't doing great during the past month. It didn't help that I had once again convinced myself to stop taking my medication, largely because I wanted one less obstacle to my everyday life on the road. My psychiatrist back at home consistently put up a fight about refilling things without me coming in every month or two, literally threatening to withhold my meds and dangerously risk horrible withdrawal symptoms unless I did exactly what he wanted me to. Not having them to lessen the weight of mental illness only compounded the impact of the very real environmental and circumstantial things I had to be devastated and haunted by. My freakouts and breakdowns were becoming more frequent and even though I was never the type to take it out on her, yell or scream, break things, hurt myself, storm out, or any of those shitty things a lot of men did, Alyssa made it no secret that she still couldn't handle them, or at least didn't want to. This only added to the pressure of everyday existence since, on top of the unbearable feelings of depression and hopelessness, I had to also constantly worry about how my feelings were making her feel. It was a very uncomfortable position to be put in, but I felt bad as it was for everything she had signed up for when dating me; how she had just spent the past year watching my entire world crumble and leave me incapable of crawling back out from the rubble of the fallout. She was stronger than me in just about every way, even if she had depression, too, and she also just didn't have a decade of struggling to survive to leave her as jaded and exhausted as I was. The fear of my black cloud consuming her really stuck with me each night. I texted her early in our stay at the RV park one night while working...
Me: I hope you're relaxing and maybe playing saxophone. I love you so much. Please let me know if I can be doing a better job as a partner. I know I've been really weak lately and that it's hard for you, but please know I notice how it affects you and that I am so grateful you're willing and able to pick up the slack I leave behind while having a breadkdown.
Her: Yeah, i was just playing saxophone...
Her: I don't mind picking up slack, but what gets difficult is when it feels like I have to also fight against you... I don't know if you're aware of it but in those moments you kind of turn into a different person, you treat me very differently, and it makes me want to not say or do anything until it passes and you turn back into normal Dave. But when you keep asking me for answers and I give my opinions or thoughts or try to brainstorm solutions, it just seems to make you spiral even more, and even if the anger and frustration isn't BECAUSE of me, it's still being directed AT me
Me: :(
Me: We can talk about it more when I get home. I'm sorry.
We experienced a couple thunderstorms here. They were some of the loudest, heaviest, scariest thunderstorms I'd ever sat through, though they were probably typical for anyone living in Florida. The tarp kept us protected, though we definitely held each other real tight during the really loud blasts of thunder like two little babies. No matter how many times we had to set up the tarp to drape it over the camper and stabilize it with branches and bungee cords, it never got any easier to do. It felt like the tarp or camper were somehow a different size every time we had to prepare for a heavy rain. The frustration of that, mixed with the fact that rain was quite genuinely a trauma trigger for me as a depressed homeless guy, caused me to kinda lose my mind every single time. One day, I was freaking out about it all right before having to rush out and work another night, and Alyssa stood there, frozen, looking like a shellshocked combat veteran having a flashback for some reason. It was really strange, and honestly a little annoying because of how dramatic it seemed. All I could think was, 'Great, I'm not allowed to show this feeling around her anymore.' I'd already been keeping so much negativity away from her as it was! I gave her a kiss goodbye and got going. Later that night, I texted her:
Me: I love you. I'm gonna start taking my meds again and try with all of my might to just never speak openly or let it be visible that I am upset and/or stressed. Please don't hate me.
Her: I just can't handle it when every obstacle is met with the same level of response every time it happens.... it's not that you can't show that you're upset, but sometimes the intensity of what you're feeling seems incongruous with what's happening and I feel blindsided by it
Her: I'd really like if you started taking your medication again... I was going to ask if you were still off them
Her: I love you.
Her: I'm doing my best...
Her: Like to be there for you
It was so frustrating and I had no idea what to do about it. I had so much anxiety that night, wracking my brain for a solution to being a little less me around her during high-stress situations. It was such an awful feeling being so misunderstood by the person I relied on most to understand me. It was only a few nights earlier when the car died, I was freaking out on the phone to her about not being able to afford the $800 gas gauge repair, that I'd responded to similar comments. I felt so invalidated by the word "incongruous"--I had tried explaining to her that when it came to trauma, the triggers wouldn't always be obvious and would oftentimes be seemingly mundane; that what mattered most in my mind was what they represented. I thought she already understood this, but she apparently didn't, and worse, still didn't even after that conversation. I thought it was pretty ridiculous considering how incongruous her reaction to me having a panic attack was. I brought it up as soon as I got back home that night, desperate to smooth things out and undo any amount of resentment I feared she was developing for me. It didn't go well.
She wound up crying and calling herself crazy, which caught me off-guard and seemed like her way of derailing the discussion. As always, I tried to reassure her that she wasn't. In the end, I was the one who tried to end it peacefully by saying, "This is stupid, I don't want to argue anymore, I'm sorry." It seemed like I really did have to just not be upset around her anymore. We lived together, though, and I wasn't immediately sure how I was going to pull that off. Ranting to no one in particular in those moments really helped me blow off steam when I had no other outlets available to me. They say that every couple has that one argument they never stop having, and this was ours. For the most part, it was our only "argument", though I thought it more accurate to describe as a "miscommunication". I really thought I had it figured out when she told me outright months ago that something I could do to help her was make sure I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her. I started doing that almost immediately. I had always quick to ask, "What can I do differently in the future?" and this was the only suggestion she was ever able to offer me, so I grabbed at it right away. Needless to say, it was hard to remember to take time to gently remind her that I wasn't mad at her, especially when I knew she knew that I'd never been mad at her at any point in the entire relationship, and while also in the midst of freaking the fuck out. Still, I made sure I did it. That night, like I always did, I tried to end the problem by asking what I could do differently or better, and she basically told me again that I had to reassure her... but do it more? I had no idea what that meant, and I admittedly felt at a loss. I was already into the habit of reminding her of what was obvious and redundant; to hear that it still wasn't good enough really upset me. She was being impossible. I felt entitled to my feelings and my right to express them openly as long as I wasn't acting out in any toxic or dangerous ways, and I felt having it turned into something about her was silencing me. I knew, as a couple, we both owed each other a certain level of consideration, regardless of our moods, but I felt like this was getting out of hand. I always hoped it would be enough that, during my bad moods, I never took them out on her. Even in the rare times where I would unknowingly do something that was inappropriate, like suddenly assume she meant the worst possible thing with something she said, or give an attitude in response to a suggestion that my enraged tunnel vision was preventing me from seeing, I was always quick to apologize.
After that night, I started taking my medication as promised, and really did intend on trying to either walk away or otherwise try to keep my less chipper feelings to myself. I didn't have another "freakout" after that, at least not outwardly while sharing space with her. By that night, I would have rather been emotionally repressed than ever make her feel sad or crazy again.
As summer crept in, the days were getting warmer and more humid. We knew we couldn't stay in Florida for much longer even if we had the RV park to rely on, but repeated prodding couldn't seem to get Alyssa to have that conversation with me yet. I had no idea what we would do next, and I honestly didn't want to even think about it since the options seemed so limited and unsatisfying. Over those four weeks, I openly analyzed the few potential moves we could make. I still had a written itinerary for the rest of the country; basically a map for nonstop travel that would take us a year or longer to complete. But the pandemic shutting the country down made almost everything worth traveling for impossible, and even restricted us from the little corporate resources we got used to utilizing, like Walmarts for 24-hour bathrooms and Starbucks for day-long loitering spots. As we'd learned, we couldn't even camp in the woods or stop in national parks anymore. What would traveling and actively trying to have fun in different states even look like during the pandemic? Alyssa told me once she wanted to see her older sister back in northern Texas, and I was open to that plan, but Alyssa wouldn't answer any of my follow-up questions, such as how long we could stay there and if she had space in her yard for our camper. Going with that small glimpse into what Alyssa wanted, I suggested we use the money I'd saved up from working to pay for a month-long stay at an entire house through Air B'n'B. I'd looked up rentals online for the city her sister lived in and was able to find a few cute ones for precisely the amount we had. I proposed that I continue working and saving money, hopefully making back what we spent and then some, and affording her time with her sister while we didn't have to deal with the logistics of living in a pop-up camper during a pandemic. I told her that I honestly wanted her to get some time away from my negativity. To my surprise, she was aggressively opposed to this, though, saying she didn't want to spend that kinda money on something like that. Next thing I knew, her desire to go to her sister's suddenly disappeared. All that was left was the option of traveling again, and by our last day at the RV park, I explicitly asked her once and for all what she wanted to do and she told me she wanted to start traveling again, starting in Atlanta, where we both agreed we were excited to finally eat at Slutty Vegan. It didn't seem practical to me, but when she told me she was excited about it, I felt a little better.
I asked her that day, "Do you want to go back home? Because if I had a home, I'd choose to go back to it."
She responded without hesitation, "No, that's not an option."
That last night, we fed strawberries that were starting to go bad to the chickens. We took showers and cleaned ourselves up for what I figured would be the last time for a while. Alyssa suggested getting Chinese takeout as "one last hurrah" for dinner. When we got to the pavilion to eat it, I quickly realized mine was chicken instead of tofu, and had to go back and get a replacement. Alyssa said she'd wait for me to start eating. When we got in bed, I surprised her by putting on a movie she was always saying she wanted to see, Gattaca, followed by Children of the Corn. We cuddled and read trivia for each of them on IMDb like we always did. I was very worried about the future in just about every regard, but found peace in the fact that I would at least be facing it with Alyssa by my side.
Here's a little video of some things I saw!
It might not have been the most extravagant of setups, but we loved our little home. As long as we could still cuddle and watch movies with a fan on us, I was happy...
So, we spent the last month at an RV park in Spring Hill. Today is our last day here. We hoped the whole Coronapocalypse would be over by the time we got to this day, but it obviously isn't, and at this point I am sincerely convinced that this is the beginning of the end--there's certainly no end in sight. I have significant doubts that we will ever return to the state of oppression most of us had learned to tolerate, and things are only going to get worse from this point forward, especially since this whole situation has proven to be incredibly advantageous to the powers that be: we're all aggressively and unquestioningly policing ourselves and each other while being policed even more heavily by the actual police, more laws are being passed quietly or under the guise of public safety, all the main corporations who own this country are doing just fine while independent businesses gradually disappear, and the stock market has done the best it has since the Great Depression. I can't stop thinking about all of the things I didn't get to do, and now I can't even travel the country one last time since most of it is shut down. I wish I had a home to go back to.
Most of the past month, for me, was spent either doing DoorDash deliveries, scratching myself, or both at the same time. For three weeks, I spent just about every night, between 6PM and 3AM, delivering disgusting food to people, at first just to get some relief from the humidity and the bugs biting me, but also in hopes of saving up a nice little nest egg for whatever future Alyssa and I chose together. It usually took the entire nine hours just to break $100, which was my personal goal for each night, although the average driver typically made about $20+ an hour. The area we were in just wasn't the best. The first $500 of it immediately went toward Alyssa's car insurance for the first half of this year, an obvious but devastating necessity, and after that we were able to accumulate and put away a little over $1,000 just for gas and emergencies as we both waited for our Trump checks to come in. (Any and all liberals reading this: feel free to send yours to me and Alyssa if you don't wanna take any of that blood money from him!) It was also important to me that Alyssa had money in her bank account so she'd never feel financially dependent on me or like she didn't have the means to leave if she ever wanted to. This was the first time in years that she didn't have any savings of her own and wasn't at all employed, and because I was using her DoorDash account to work, every penny I made was already being automatically deposited to her account.
The nights were pretty uneventful. I became very acquainted with the area and started to subsist partially off of the worst vegan options fast food had to offer. I listened to music a lot and spent way too much time in my own head as I drove down dark roads, going over every horrible thing that has ever happened since I was born. For the most part, orders were consistent, but usually small $6-8 ones where the DoorDash base pay would be like $2-3 and the person would maybe add a $3 tip if I was lucky. Spring Hill wasn't really a proper city, so it was to be expected. I watched the sun set every day over a long strip of chain eateries along Cortez while loitering at the Circle K or Wawa in between orders, drinking an 85-cent fountain drink and reading. A lot of people selected 'no contact' for their orders, so I thankfully didn't have to interact with many people and just had to leave their food outside their doors. There was a McDonald's rush almost every night between 1 and 3 where I'd get several consecutive orders for $3-5 delivering absurd combinations of food to young rich slobs who usually didn't tip. I lost count of how many times I had to deliver 40 chicken McNuggets to someone. I struck up a friendly relationship with the poor older woman who had to work overnight there. She was very vocal with me about her disgust for the people who ordered from there and her general hatred for her job.
"Why don't they go the fuck home and eat something normal for a change?!" she complained out loud to me.
One night, she told me someone ordered 38 cheeseburgers. Another night, I watched a young white trash couple, both in denim jeans and white shirts, wait patiently in the drive-thru line on foot between a line of cars, and then act outraged and surprised when they were told they couldn't do it through the speaker. The man went as far as asking to speak to the manager, who obviously repeated that they couldn't do it for liability reasons, and he at first tried to say he was on a bike when she said they could only take orders from people in cars. They stormed off in a huff about it. It was an unsettling reminder that people not only still ate there, but with a passionate regularity. The people who ordered McDonald's were most likely to live less than a mile away from it; people who ordered Chipotle or Taco Bell seldom tipped; people who ordered big dinners from Applebee's and Chili's normally tipped really well. One time, someone tipped me a quarter for their late-night delivery of McDondald's. Another, someone tipped me fifty cents. It was worse than not tipping at all, I felt; like way more of a 'fuck you' than a simple disregard for me as a service worker. I also had to deliver several times down a long, dark, dirt road far outside of town, to a perpetually shirtless teenager with long, greasy, blond hair whose account name was Dickbaginton. He not once tipped, and was one of the few people to hit me up because I wasn't getting to him fast enough.
I was always at the mercy of the establishments I was picking up from, of course. So if my first stop was a local pizza place that told me there was a 45-minute wait, I just had to sit there and wait. If DoorDash sent me another order during that time, I'd accept it, but the app wouldn't let me get and deliver it until I finished the first one, so I still just had to wait around and not make money for an hour and a half. The small orders people made drove me the craziest, like a Taco Bell order of one cinnamon twist and two Baja Blast Freezes, for which the app paid me $3 and the two 12-year-olds who'd ordered it tipped me $2 in cash. Then there was the app itself, or in conjunction with my awful service provider, constantly fucking me over. I'd get a text saying there was an incoming order, but the order would never appear in the actual app, leaving me helpless until I got a follow-up text informing me I had missed a delivery opportunity. This would reduce my order acceptance rate, which would in turn reduce the number of orders sent my way. One night, I was at a Chili's and the waitress said to me, "There are, like, ten DoorDash orders in there right now. I shouldn't have come to work, I shoulda just dashed tonight!" It was sad to think so many of these minimum-wage workers at the chains I picked up from were also having to supplement their income with this stupid app. There would be entire nights of one solitary order at a time, taking me 15 minutes or further outside of town to the many six-figure designer home cul-de-sacs, for a couple bucks and almost never any tip from these rich fucks. At best, they'd say in the order notes that they'd be tipping in cash and then they just... wouldn't. One time, I delivered Chinese food to one of the biggest mansions I'd ever seen, surrounded in a tall fence with two gates requiring key code entries to open, outdoor speakers playing classical music, and an entire knight stood up near the entry doors. Those people tipped me $3. Those moments were particularly soul-crushing.
Otherwise, I just tried to find entertainment in the little things I'd see on my drives, mostly signs of the ultra-conservative life around me. People held up signs at intersections there a lot, I noticed, mostly right-leaning nonsense. People hung out in parking lots a lot, too: groups of motorcyclists and bros with shiny muscle cars stood around by the Wawa or across the street by the abandoned Sears, while entire families sat in foldout chairs like they were on a blacktop gravel beach until sundown. Spring Hill was one of the most heavily policed areas I'd ever seen; one out of every five cars was a cop, and I'd see between one and six of them at a time hanging out in the shadows of every shopping plaza, school, and any other vacant lot I'd drive by. There were a lot of car accidents and a small homeless population, but I could not figure out why it was on such heavy lockdown. For a job that was relatively easy, where I made my own schedule and had some bit of control over what I did and did not do, it was still very dehumanizing. By the time I'd get home, Alyssa would be fast asleep. We stopped having sex entirely that final month because I just felt far too uncomfortable always being itchy, sweaty, and covered in layers of dirt and medicated topical ointments. I started jerking off in my car before heading home each night. I felt like I had some hobo version of the miserable lives all my married and wage-slaved peers had.
A very Florida DoorDash experience.
Alyssa lived an entirely different life in our camper, just relaxing and fiddling with her many talents and creative endeavors, working on her drawings and adding parts to the epic saxophone piece she had been working on since before we even left town, teaching herself new skills like stick-and-poke tattooing using a DIY kit I got her for her birthday and some spare fruit. She was always full of ideas and curiosities, which I admired. One day, she would just wake up and decide she wanted to see if she could encase a tiny dinosaur I found in a pretty resin cube. Stuff like that. I envied her drive to want to create and pursue projects, and mourned the loss of those in me, but those urges just weren't in me anymore since the cancellation. It became enough for me to help support her own and try to facilitate a life for her where she didn't have to worry about survival and could just focus on those things, so I went out every night to work and make money for us while she stayed behind at the camper and wrote, drew, practiced saxophone, and talked to other people online. I always would tell her I wanted her to be famous, and deserved to be, and encouraged her to make new friends online even though I no longer had any interest in meeting new people are getting close to anyone who wasn't her or Tia. I desperately didn't want her life to be over just because mine was, and I hoped I could make those two conflicting realities coexist peacefully and happily. I was constantly checking in, asking her if she was happy, having fun, still in love with me, didn't want to go home. Every time, she gave me a smile and assured me she was. Part of me wished she wasn't doing so well so I wouldn't feel so alone just so I didn't feel so alone in my misery, but I was also relieved that she wasn't losing her mind the way I was. It gave me meaning that I didn't otherwise have to be this partner who was taking care of things and maintaining a nest for us to live in. Everything else I had to live for and find fulfillment had been taken from me, so I put my all into the two most important things left in my life: Alyssa and the camper. All that was left for me was to be a perfect boyfriend.
The only real downside to spending the month at the RV park for me, though, was that I quickly realized it was a hot spot for no-see-ums (also known as biting midges, or sand flies), likely because we were near the swimming pool and/or because the park was located on a pond. Bugs fucking loved me for some reason, which sucked because I had very intense reactions to bug bites, whether they be from fleas or mosquitoes or bedbugs. At that point in my life, I feel I'd spent a good majority of it scratching myself, and I was covered in scars from it. I'd had to go through scabies and folliculitis several times, hives, lice, fleas, bedbugs, allergic reactions to random plants, and would always get devoured if I was anywhere near mosquitoes. I didn't handle it well. A bug bite for me usually resulted in a bigger, more inflamed bump than was typical, with an especially severe itchiness, far worse than for most people I knew. On my own personal scale of suffering, the bites of no-see-ums lay somewhere between a mosquito bite (which were usually pretty big on me and could be itchy nonstop for upwards of two weeks) and a bedbug bite (which almost immediately formed hard welts that itched enough to drive any person insane). No-see-ums were almost invisible to the naked eye, being as small as a crumb, but their bites hurt on impact and provoked some of the worst itchiness I'd experienced in my entire life. As some healed, they just got replaced with new ones. One night, I cried over it, because I had been itchy for days on end, unable to sleep through an entire night, and there were times where there were no bugs anywhere to be found in our camper as I literally watched new bites materialize in clusters on my legs. The injuries I left behind trying to relieve the itch were preferable to the itch, but still painful since I was usually seriously damaging my flesh, grinding and scratching away at them with Velcro, open scissors, knives, bottle caps--really whatever I could find. Soon, the itch of a healing injury replaced the original itch of the bite. It was a vicious cycle.
Cutter sprays not only made me feel oily and disgusting, and burned my skin since I was covering myself in poison, but they also didn't seem to deter bugs from biting me. For this trip, since I had gone through my two bottles of Rad Soap bug spray (which actually worked quite well) and the homemade concoction Colleen made for me, I picked up a big bottle of Quantum Health Buzz Away Extreme from Whole Foods, which was the only vegan brand they had and was made from all-natural, non-DEET ingredients. This spray had done nothing for me. I practically bathed myself in it and would moments later sit and watch a mosquito land right on me. I found a YouTube video by some hunter guy suggesting a mixture of plain Listerine, witch hazel, and tea tree oil, so I went out and got that stuff with a spray bottle and covered the entire interior of the camper, as well as my body with it. It seemed to work at first, but clearly hadn't in the long-term. We also set out a trap of apple cider vinegar and dish soap--usually intended for fruit flies, but alleged to work on no-see-ums, too--and after a couple days the bowl had caught exactly zero bugs of any kind. So there didn't seem to be any way to repel these fuckers. Usually for mosquito bites, I used some medicated Benadryl anti-itch gel. This worked for no more than 15 minutes at a time for me when it came to these bites, and I knew I could make things worse if I basically overdosed on this topical medication like I had in the past with bedbug bites. So I tried maximum strength Cortizone 10 cream with aloe, whose bottle claimed it lasted for ten hours. It lasted longer than the Benadryl gel, for about an hour or so, but nowhere near the ten advertised, and it only really worked if I put enough on my skin to lather up like soap. I tried putting witch hazel directly on the bites, but that did nothing. Sometimes, in an attempt to avoid further hurting myself, I'd slap the bite instead of scratch it, which momentarily helped but not for long. Showers in hot or cold water, and the heat of the sun, both sent the bites into a tingling like being pricked with a buncha little needles that I could hardly handle.
So it had been a pretty uncomfortable three weeks for me. I'd toughed it out and only cried once. I oftentimes was covered in scabs, sores, and dried blood, or friction burn from rubbing away at bites near my ankles with my sneakers. Every night, I'd wake up several times to having to scratch, or feel a phantom tickling that seemed like a bug was on me when there wasn't. I constantly felt like I was covered in bugs. Alyssa remained mostly unscathed, even though she regularly hung around partially naked.
War wounds. The bugs won.
Another big part of our routine was cooking dinner once a day, which we split responsibility for, and was one of the only fun or fulfilling things I did each day. Being and staying vegan was easy, of course, even when camping full-time and relying on food stamps. A lot of what we ate came from local dumpsters that I'd stop by during or after work each night. Below are some of the meals we made...
Dumpster bowl filled with steamed cabbage, seasoned tiny potatoes, slices of avocado, roasted cauliflower, and barbecue caramelized onions! This entire meal came from the trash.
Spaghetti with chickpeas, peppers, and onions, topped in nooch, crushed red pepper flakes, and Newman's Own sockarooni sauce! The spaghetti, peppers, and onions were all from the trash.
A big bowl of potato salad made with petite potatoes from a dumpster, celery, carrot, onion, Hellmann's vegan mayo, dijon and spicy brown mustard, apple cider vinegar, and seasonings, to go along with our Field Roast burgers. We ate at the little kitchen table at the pavilion, which was nice.
Just some sad burgers.
Red curry tofu with carrot, red pepper, and mushrooms!
Big veggie pita bowls. The pita bread couldn't be opened into pockets, we found out, so we just sandwiched them, cut them in half, and threw them in bowls with a side of goddess dressing. The pitas were lightly toasted, spread with Hope hummus, and stuffed with Boston lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, mushrooms, avocado, cucumber, grated carrot, onion, green onion, hamburger pickles, and dijon mustard. So good.
Burritos! These were filled with green pepper, onion, black beans, MorningStar ground beef with spices and seasonings, cheddar Daiya, Boston lettuce, avocado, green onion, and hot sauce.
Chicken fajitas, using Morningstar chicken strips, three different colors of peppers, jalapeño, onion, rice, and all the traditional seasonings and spices!
Sloppy joes and canned green beans. We used Morningstar ground beef and a can of Manwich sauce and spread some Hellmann's mayo on the Wonderbread buns. Their mayo tastes like paper by itself. I recently discovered that bagged frozen vegan meats like those from Morningstar will slowly fill up with water if they're inside a cooler of melting ice, so the ground beef was quite mushy. Thankfully, sloppy joes are supposed to be kinda mushy?
Dumpster spaghetti with bolognese made from Lightlife tempeh!
Toasted everything bagel sandwiches with Kite Hill cream cheese, avocado, cucumber, shredded carrot, pickles, and lettuce!
Big bowls of buffalo chicken salad! I kept seeing it on the Wendy's menu whenever I did deliveries, so I tried to make it myself with lettuce, cucumber, grated carrot, avocado, tomato, pickles, crispy onions, and Morningstar chicken patties fried without oil until crispy and cut into thin strips, with Frank's buffalo sauce and a dollop of mayo since I couldn't find ranch anywhere. This salad was way bigger and deeper than the picture shows, and it was fucking awesome.
Potatoes, asparagus, and barbecue baked black eyed peas!
Giant bowl of salad with tofu, sweet potato, mushrooms, carrot, cucumber, and avocado with ginger dressing!
Breakfast burritos with tofu scramble, peppers and onion, avocado, and Lightlife sausage!
Though a far cry from the forest we were originally staying in (and preferred), the RV park and city was not without plenty of wild critters to see, particularly cool bugs who wandered into our camper at night. Taking in and appreciating the other creatures we shared this dying planet with made everyday life a lot more magical and exciting to me. Driving around and doing DoorDash deliveries almost every night, I saw a lot of awful, ugly humans and human creations, and the beautiful, graceful, innocent non-human animals I'd see really balanced it all out, or so I liked to try and convince myself...
This lone parking lot peacock was strutting around outside their home at the Weeki Wachee Springs State Park. I pulled in to admire them and they immediately began to saunter toward me. I saw him out there almost daily, after 5 and before sunset.
The two hens we'd named Helen and Martha came over to our camper a lot. There was also little Roger, who would crow at 5:30 every morning even though he was too small for any of the ladies to take seriously. I loved watching him.
A gorgeous emerald moth came into our camper.
What I am pretty sure was a poplar borer beetle also kept coming into our camper, even though they were supposed to like trees. I had to bring them back outside three fucking times.
We had an armadillo neighbor again, this one even bigger than the one we'd seen back at Serenova Tract. It was hard to get pictures with their cute faces visible because they were busy burying their snout in the dirt.
One night, I heard loud slaps and rustling against the tarp outside the bunk end window, just inches from where my head lay. I shined the cellphone light through the screen and saw this tree frog climbing up it. They then jumped toward the light for some reason, sticking to the screen.
A lovely junebug visited us.
I was returning to the car with a delivery and caught this adorable treehopper near my window. I left them there and they eventually scattered up the window, clinging on effortlessly as I drove. Treehoppers are one of our absolute favorite insects, in large part because of how uniquely varied they are in size, shape, color, and physiology.
In the same parking lot, I saw this egret examining a green newspaper box very carefully. I thought they were really pretty, and never found out what they saw that was so alluring.
We'd slept in so many woods the last two months and had heard plenty of barred owls cackling like monkeys late at night, but I hadn't seen one up close until delivering to some random apartment complex. They eventually flew off because I got too close with my phone, using my car's high beams for lighting. Watching their impressive wing span open before they zoomed into the darkness of some trees was incredible.
Behind a strip mall, we saw a big group of crows and vultures hanging around a dumpster together, wearing all black and in the rain like a group of goths. It really warmed my heart.
An absolutely beautiful bright green orb weaver moved into our camper. We always welcomed the spiders as free pest control.
We also found a small brown gecko on our window one night.
On our last day, a green anole found their way inside the camper and scurried around until I helped guide them out through one of the screen windows, even though we both wanted him to live with us forever.
The big, bulky, BDSM-looking lubber grasshoppers took over the screen walls around the swimming pool.
We'd also seen a few black racer snakes who seemed to live in the bushes behind us. We'd caught them speedily climbing trees up after prey. It was totally amazing and caught us off-guard to see a snake climb up a tree, especially as fast as they apparently could. The other day on route 50, I saw a reddish snake crossing the street. 3. We had an entire bag of dumpstered apples sitting outside and squirrels gradually stole each one. We were both amazed at well they could pick these relatively huge apples up with just their mouths and still be able to climb and jump trees with the same amount of accuracy and agility. Earlier in the day, we could hear woodpeckers, and at night we heard owls. The other day, I helped an anole who had fallen into the swimming pool. I'd almost hit a few possums. While taking the tarp off the camper once a storm had finished, we found a brown recluse spider, who ran off and hid under the first leaf they could get under. Brown recluse spiders were genuinely reclusive, which was why most people would never get bitten by one, let alone see one up-close. Please don't kill bugs that you don't absolutely have to!
Toward the end of our stay, the lives of our wonderful chicken neighbors became something of our nightly responsibility. It all started late one night when we suddenly heard the frightened and strained screams of a member of the flock. It sounded horrific, and we both silently held our breath and listened, more than sure of what was happening: a critter had broken in and was trying to kill and eat someone. I went out with a flashlight and, sure enough, I caught a raccoon halfway up the tree with one of the ladies in their mitts and jaw. They froze and we stared at each other. I had no idea what to do, or even if I should do something. Was this the circle of life or whatever? Did it count as natural if the chickens being eaten by a legitimately wild animal had been forcibly and selectively bred into this world and were now being kept in an artificial, precarious situation on the property of an RV park? Was any of this fair to them? Could the natural forces of the wild world around them even be prevented? I still tried to help when I could, but we'd already lost one of them.
Another night, the threat was a family of possums who lived in the trees above them. Thankfully, the big hen acted as the rooster Roger couldn't be because of his size and was very loud and aggressive about keeping intruders out. I went out one night with my cellphone light and my squirt bottle of anti-no-see-um spray, ready to do whatever I could to get any potential murderers outta there. That night, I caught a tiny, young possum, frozen with glowing eyes, underneath all of the chickens as they perched on their individual spaces, all of them awake and looking paralyzed by fear. I sprayed and sprayed until the possum left. It was the best I could do. I'd hear yelling again, and run out just in time to see the hen beating a larger possum up, sending them scattering back up the tree from which they came. She was such a bad-ass. She did get a little tangled in the elastic fencing once, and I had to carefully and gently convince her I was there to help her get out of it. I stood around for a while, guarding the area along with her, as she strutted back and forth outside the coop, panting from exhaustion and her eyes fluttering open and closed from how tired she was, thrown off her nightly sleep schedule. I was so impressed by her and her dedication to her flock.
We'd tell the owners about it and they acted surprised and sad about it, but I wasn't sure what else they expected out of keeping this chicken coop outdoors in Florida without any predator deterrents. A few nights later, while I was out working, Alyssa would text me about scary noises coming from the coop again. We were both so frustrated that these chickens existed in the first place and had to endure the stress of their circumstances. She'd go out and find that a young raccoon had been caught in a trap left by the property owners. We debated letting them out, but weren't sure of what the right thing to do was, and ultimately left them there. They looked so sad and defeated. No more chickens lost their lives while we were there.
One night on my way to a DoorDash order, I saw two people in the road next to two tiny black dogs. As I always do, I slowed and asked them if everything was okay. The woman told me they saw these two dogs running loose in the middle of the thruway and were trying to catch them. I canceled my delivery and immediately pulled over to help. The two little pups had collars but no identifying information, and my general rule was that if a dog was found in that sort of situation it was likely because of shitty guardians. They weren't aggressive, but were skittish, and kept prancing off counterintuitively into the middle of the four-lane road. Thankfully, it was after midnight and traffic was limited. We lured them in with bits of chicken McNuggets the couple had in their car. After a couple minutes of hovering over them patiently, I grabbed one behind their ribs around their waist. She peed all over me and half-heartedly bit, but didn't even break my skin even though she easily could have. I cradled her and talked to her soothingly while petting her and she quickly realized I was a friend. Her brother, though, was not as trusting, and kept getting further away, barking but refusing to let his sister out of his sight. It took a half hour to get him. He ran out into a wide, open, dark grassy field, behind a building, into bushes, giving us only his barks to keep track of where he was. He wouldn't abandon his sister, but we had no intentions of separating them, anyway. I grabbed a blanket from the car and me and the woman started walking over to another parking lot where he had scurried off to.
As risky as it was, we decided she'd put the sister down, in hopes that she would lure him back to us. The pup started walking ahead of us, but kept stopping and looking at us, as if to ensure we were still following. I wondered if she could put in a good word for us to her brother. The brother let us all reunite with him and we were close again. I put the sheet down on the concrete and got down on their level, patting my hands on the blanket, which instigated them trying to play along with me, imitating my hands with their paws. As soon as I saw an opportunity, I grabbed the brother by their collar. He instantly flipped over onto his back as if to be accepting death, no barking, and I rubbed his belly a little before picking him up and wrapping him in my blanket while the woman held the sister. Every time I'd get ahead of his sister, he'd twist his neck around just to make sure he knew where she was. It was so sweet. The couple took them and would be taking care of the rest, ensuring they found homes and weren't separated. Mission accomplished.
Earlier, a cop and fire marshal had pulled over by my car, allegedly to make sure everything was okay. We explained what we were doing and they went on their way. By the time we had caught the other dog, the cop had returned, and was standing above us on the sidewalk, shining his flashlight and asking, "Did you get 'im?" We thought he was just checking on us, curious about the conclusion on what was probably another boring night for him, but nope. When the brother dog had started running off, too far for either of us to keep up, I turned my car around and drove further up the road just to get closer faster, driving against the traffic that wasn't there. The roads were dead, and every road in Florida had giant concrete medians requiring constant u-turns. I didn't waste my time doing that, and pulled over onto the grass by the shoulder, putting my hazards on. I was technically facing oncoming traffic, but was nowhere dangerous. After our prior interaction, I naively assumed the extenuating circumstances were understood and that all was well. But as soon as I climbed back up the bank to my car, the police officer barked at me, "Hold on one minute, sir! Can I talk to you?"
I was standing in my open door when I turned around, him cornering me. He asked if he could see my ID. I was in disbelief. As is routine for me, I asked him, "What for?"
He gave me the usual, "I just wanna know who I'm talking to."
I asked him why and if I was being detained.
Instead of answering my question directly, he repeated, "I just wanna know who I'm talking to," several more times.
This was all pretty typical to the process, in my experience. Then his nice guy attitude switched instantly and he sternly said, "Listen, if you wanna do it the hard way, I can write you all the tickets in the world right now!"
I knew he knew he could.
I said, "There it is! A threat to bend me to your will!"
He demanded I step away from my car and over toward his.
He kept referring to "my attitude", to which I told him I was just exercising my rights. I told him I knew he was "fishing", meaning he was checking me just on the off-chance that I had an outstanding warrant or any other reason he could arrest me. He scoffed, then tried to tell me I was parked "dangerously" where I was.
So I said, "Then let me go and I can move the car right now! If you are genuinely stopping me because of where my car is, because it's sooo dangerous, then let me get into it and drive off."
Of course, they didn't, because that wasn't why they were detaining me. Unfortunately for me, they had my technical traffic infraction as just cause in this moment.
The other officer stepped out of the vehicle and I told them both, "It's absolutely shameful and disgusting that I was just out here doing a good thing, that neither of you would have done, and you're going to exploit it as an opportunity to maybe make an arrest."
He again threatened me with tickets if I didn't shut up.
I asked him, "So this is 'bad cop' now, right?"
I told him it was absolutely terrifying how quickly and easily he changed his demeanor as soon as I didn't give him what he wanted.
He went into his car with my ID. I continued to berate the other cop, pointing out that they could have just as easily let me leave without an altercation.
"We're just following policy," he robotically tried to tell me.
"Oh, come on, you're cops! You can do whatever you want whenever you want!"
He just kept saying, "You're entitled to your opinion."
The guy came back out with my ID and for some reason then asked the other cop to check it, too.
I asked if my ID was okay and he told me he didn't have to answer any of my questions.
"You're a public servant, you absolutely have to answer my questions."
I told him that I had too much self-respect to just hand over my ID to every cop who asked me for it, and repeated how deplorable it was for him to be using this as an opportunity to maybe make an arrest. As they always do, he tried to tell me he was originally just going to look at it and let me go, and that he was trying to be kind with me.
"Kindness isn't conditional. You weren't being kind. You were asking me for my ID for no reason so you could check if I had any outstanding warrants and then threatened me with tickets as soon as I didn't bend to your will. That's not kindness."
In time, he admitted, "Listen, you have no idea how many people we pull over each night who have warrants out for their arrest--"
"See! You just confirmed exactly what I said you were doing!" I cut him off, exclaiming.
He somehow still denied that he had. I got my ID back, I went on my way, thankfully without any tickets. The cops both looked exhausted. Did I make that scenario harder for myself? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. I was tired of living in a police state and if I was going to be harassed by cops, I was going to put up a fight. Imagine seeing three people rescue two dogs. The one person has committed a minor infraction, but nothing dangerous and about to be fixed any second anyway. And your first thought is: 'I wonder if I can arrest this motherfucker right now.' Disgusting.
I thought about a few nights earlier when I ran out of gas right in the middle of a DoorDash delivery. A cop stopped and asked me what was going on and I told him I'd run out of gas. I told him I was going to have to ride my bike over a mile away to the nearest gas station and fill up water bottles from the trash with gasoline and ride back.
He told me, "Yeahhh, we aren't really supposed to escort people around..."
I asked, "You don't have a gas jug or anything in your car with you?"
He said no.
I said to him, "Cops should have things like that, so they can actually help people."
"Yeah, but we're just supposed to deal with criminal activity."
He drove off and, I kid you not, he immediately pulled someone over around the corner. Cops didn't exist to help us. They existed to make as many people into criminals as possible.
My last week or so at the RV park, I stopped doing deliveries, satisfied with what I had been able to raise. Between March and April, I'd technically made over $2,200, but after expenses I really only had a little over a grand to show for it all. I didn't have anything else to do with myself, though. I spent the days hanging out at the pavilion, enjoying refuge from the heat and the bugs who wanted to eat me, some of the time tediously moving my travelog entries from Facebook over to this LiveJournal, which took a while just because of having to resize and upload photos and then do the HTML for each entry. Another man hung out there every single day, practically all day, sitting in the reclining chair and channel-surfing, usually settling on reruns of old football games, though one time he very enthusiastically watched the second half of Big Momma's House 2. Alyssa would come in there to sit on one of the comfy couches to draw and we'd sometimes eat dinner at one of the long tables. After being on such different schedules, it was just nice to curl up together after dinner and put on a movie. One day, she told me she was happy to be able to see me more now that I'd taken a break from working, and it made me feel really good.
The one and only time I tried putting some of my own food into the freezer of the community fridge, someone ate my bag of Morningstar nuggets. I was glad someone ate vegan meat instead of real meat, but still pretty annoyed. A woman who we assumed was in some way associated with the man who hung out inside there sat in her car just as long and regularly, chainsmoking and watching things on her phone. Her young son would go in every now and then to hop around and watch cartoons, clearly trying to burn all the adolescent energy he couldn't put toward anything while living at an RV park. He was such a cutie. One day, unprovoked, he went out of his way to tell me, "It just feels nice to be nice! It feels good to be good!" He was a small glimmer of hope in a dark and unforgiving world that would likely beat these sentiments right out of him within the next couple of years. Some days, I'd just fall asleep on one of the couches with the box fan pointed at me. I hated not feeling comfortable enough to stay in my own camper, but it was what it was. During moments that I tried, I began playing my little Casio keyboard, just trying to write little songs for no reason in particular. I had daydreams of starting some sorta bedroom pop project with Alyssa one day, but after playing music around her a handful of times and her not once acknowledging me or what I was playing, I assumed I wasn't talented enough for her since I was a self-taught nobody and she was a classically trained saxophonist with a music degree who was very snobby about music in general.
Truthfully, I wasn't doing great during the past month. It didn't help that I had once again convinced myself to stop taking my medication, largely because I wanted one less obstacle to my everyday life on the road. My psychiatrist back at home consistently put up a fight about refilling things without me coming in every month or two, literally threatening to withhold my meds and dangerously risk horrible withdrawal symptoms unless I did exactly what he wanted me to. Not having them to lessen the weight of mental illness only compounded the impact of the very real environmental and circumstantial things I had to be devastated and haunted by. My freakouts and breakdowns were becoming more frequent and even though I was never the type to take it out on her, yell or scream, break things, hurt myself, storm out, or any of those shitty things a lot of men did, Alyssa made it no secret that she still couldn't handle them, or at least didn't want to. This only added to the pressure of everyday existence since, on top of the unbearable feelings of depression and hopelessness, I had to also constantly worry about how my feelings were making her feel. It was a very uncomfortable position to be put in, but I felt bad as it was for everything she had signed up for when dating me; how she had just spent the past year watching my entire world crumble and leave me incapable of crawling back out from the rubble of the fallout. She was stronger than me in just about every way, even if she had depression, too, and she also just didn't have a decade of struggling to survive to leave her as jaded and exhausted as I was. The fear of my black cloud consuming her really stuck with me each night. I texted her early in our stay at the RV park one night while working...
Me: I hope you're relaxing and maybe playing saxophone. I love you so much. Please let me know if I can be doing a better job as a partner. I know I've been really weak lately and that it's hard for you, but please know I notice how it affects you and that I am so grateful you're willing and able to pick up the slack I leave behind while having a breadkdown.
Her: Yeah, i was just playing saxophone...
Her: I don't mind picking up slack, but what gets difficult is when it feels like I have to also fight against you... I don't know if you're aware of it but in those moments you kind of turn into a different person, you treat me very differently, and it makes me want to not say or do anything until it passes and you turn back into normal Dave. But when you keep asking me for answers and I give my opinions or thoughts or try to brainstorm solutions, it just seems to make you spiral even more, and even if the anger and frustration isn't BECAUSE of me, it's still being directed AT me
Me: :(
Me: We can talk about it more when I get home. I'm sorry.
We experienced a couple thunderstorms here. They were some of the loudest, heaviest, scariest thunderstorms I'd ever sat through, though they were probably typical for anyone living in Florida. The tarp kept us protected, though we definitely held each other real tight during the really loud blasts of thunder like two little babies. No matter how many times we had to set up the tarp to drape it over the camper and stabilize it with branches and bungee cords, it never got any easier to do. It felt like the tarp or camper were somehow a different size every time we had to prepare for a heavy rain. The frustration of that, mixed with the fact that rain was quite genuinely a trauma trigger for me as a depressed homeless guy, caused me to kinda lose my mind every single time. One day, I was freaking out about it all right before having to rush out and work another night, and Alyssa stood there, frozen, looking like a shellshocked combat veteran having a flashback for some reason. It was really strange, and honestly a little annoying because of how dramatic it seemed. All I could think was, 'Great, I'm not allowed to show this feeling around her anymore.' I'd already been keeping so much negativity away from her as it was! I gave her a kiss goodbye and got going. Later that night, I texted her:
Me: I love you. I'm gonna start taking my meds again and try with all of my might to just never speak openly or let it be visible that I am upset and/or stressed. Please don't hate me.
Her: I just can't handle it when every obstacle is met with the same level of response every time it happens.... it's not that you can't show that you're upset, but sometimes the intensity of what you're feeling seems incongruous with what's happening and I feel blindsided by it
Her: I'd really like if you started taking your medication again... I was going to ask if you were still off them
Her: I love you.
Her: I'm doing my best...
Her: Like to be there for you
It was so frustrating and I had no idea what to do about it. I had so much anxiety that night, wracking my brain for a solution to being a little less me around her during high-stress situations. It was such an awful feeling being so misunderstood by the person I relied on most to understand me. It was only a few nights earlier when the car died, I was freaking out on the phone to her about not being able to afford the $800 gas gauge repair, that I'd responded to similar comments. I felt so invalidated by the word "incongruous"--I had tried explaining to her that when it came to trauma, the triggers wouldn't always be obvious and would oftentimes be seemingly mundane; that what mattered most in my mind was what they represented. I thought she already understood this, but she apparently didn't, and worse, still didn't even after that conversation. I thought it was pretty ridiculous considering how incongruous her reaction to me having a panic attack was. I brought it up as soon as I got back home that night, desperate to smooth things out and undo any amount of resentment I feared she was developing for me. It didn't go well.
She wound up crying and calling herself crazy, which caught me off-guard and seemed like her way of derailing the discussion. As always, I tried to reassure her that she wasn't. In the end, I was the one who tried to end it peacefully by saying, "This is stupid, I don't want to argue anymore, I'm sorry." It seemed like I really did have to just not be upset around her anymore. We lived together, though, and I wasn't immediately sure how I was going to pull that off. Ranting to no one in particular in those moments really helped me blow off steam when I had no other outlets available to me. They say that every couple has that one argument they never stop having, and this was ours. For the most part, it was our only "argument", though I thought it more accurate to describe as a "miscommunication". I really thought I had it figured out when she told me outright months ago that something I could do to help her was make sure I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her. I started doing that almost immediately. I had always quick to ask, "What can I do differently in the future?" and this was the only suggestion she was ever able to offer me, so I grabbed at it right away. Needless to say, it was hard to remember to take time to gently remind her that I wasn't mad at her, especially when I knew she knew that I'd never been mad at her at any point in the entire relationship, and while also in the midst of freaking the fuck out. Still, I made sure I did it. That night, like I always did, I tried to end the problem by asking what I could do differently or better, and she basically told me again that I had to reassure her... but do it more? I had no idea what that meant, and I admittedly felt at a loss. I was already into the habit of reminding her of what was obvious and redundant; to hear that it still wasn't good enough really upset me. She was being impossible. I felt entitled to my feelings and my right to express them openly as long as I wasn't acting out in any toxic or dangerous ways, and I felt having it turned into something about her was silencing me. I knew, as a couple, we both owed each other a certain level of consideration, regardless of our moods, but I felt like this was getting out of hand. I always hoped it would be enough that, during my bad moods, I never took them out on her. Even in the rare times where I would unknowingly do something that was inappropriate, like suddenly assume she meant the worst possible thing with something she said, or give an attitude in response to a suggestion that my enraged tunnel vision was preventing me from seeing, I was always quick to apologize.
After that night, I started taking my medication as promised, and really did intend on trying to either walk away or otherwise try to keep my less chipper feelings to myself. I didn't have another "freakout" after that, at least not outwardly while sharing space with her. By that night, I would have rather been emotionally repressed than ever make her feel sad or crazy again.
As summer crept in, the days were getting warmer and more humid. We knew we couldn't stay in Florida for much longer even if we had the RV park to rely on, but repeated prodding couldn't seem to get Alyssa to have that conversation with me yet. I had no idea what we would do next, and I honestly didn't want to even think about it since the options seemed so limited and unsatisfying. Over those four weeks, I openly analyzed the few potential moves we could make. I still had a written itinerary for the rest of the country; basically a map for nonstop travel that would take us a year or longer to complete. But the pandemic shutting the country down made almost everything worth traveling for impossible, and even restricted us from the little corporate resources we got used to utilizing, like Walmarts for 24-hour bathrooms and Starbucks for day-long loitering spots. As we'd learned, we couldn't even camp in the woods or stop in national parks anymore. What would traveling and actively trying to have fun in different states even look like during the pandemic? Alyssa told me once she wanted to see her older sister back in northern Texas, and I was open to that plan, but Alyssa wouldn't answer any of my follow-up questions, such as how long we could stay there and if she had space in her yard for our camper. Going with that small glimpse into what Alyssa wanted, I suggested we use the money I'd saved up from working to pay for a month-long stay at an entire house through Air B'n'B. I'd looked up rentals online for the city her sister lived in and was able to find a few cute ones for precisely the amount we had. I proposed that I continue working and saving money, hopefully making back what we spent and then some, and affording her time with her sister while we didn't have to deal with the logistics of living in a pop-up camper during a pandemic. I told her that I honestly wanted her to get some time away from my negativity. To my surprise, she was aggressively opposed to this, though, saying she didn't want to spend that kinda money on something like that. Next thing I knew, her desire to go to her sister's suddenly disappeared. All that was left was the option of traveling again, and by our last day at the RV park, I explicitly asked her once and for all what she wanted to do and she told me she wanted to start traveling again, starting in Atlanta, where we both agreed we were excited to finally eat at Slutty Vegan. It didn't seem practical to me, but when she told me she was excited about it, I felt a little better.
I asked her that day, "Do you want to go back home? Because if I had a home, I'd choose to go back to it."
She responded without hesitation, "No, that's not an option."
That last night, we fed strawberries that were starting to go bad to the chickens. We took showers and cleaned ourselves up for what I figured would be the last time for a while. Alyssa suggested getting Chinese takeout as "one last hurrah" for dinner. When we got to the pavilion to eat it, I quickly realized mine was chicken instead of tofu, and had to go back and get a replacement. Alyssa said she'd wait for me to start eating. When we got in bed, I surprised her by putting on a movie she was always saying she wanted to see, Gattaca, followed by Children of the Corn. We cuddled and read trivia for each of them on IMDb like we always did. I was very worried about the future in just about every regard, but found peace in the fact that I would at least be facing it with Alyssa by my side.
Here's a little video of some things I saw!
Click to view