The Camper Was Never a Dream

Life Without Margin #2
After losing our girl, we spent nearly two and a half years mostly indoors.
The camper we bought afterwards was never a dream about travelling; it was an attempt to live outside again. Some vehicles bring people to new places. Others are bought because someone has nowhere left to go.
I was not there when Mart bought the camper. Not because I did not want to be, but because our time inside my mother’s house is limited. If I had gone with him, we simply would not have finished that day. So Mart went alone. In the months before that he had already looked at several campers. This one seemed the least impossible.
It was never a moment of: this is perfect. It was more: this has to happen now, otherwise we are not leaving in time.
We realised that the camper was never really a dream. It was necessity. Maybe even a final attempt to live outside again. After losing our girl, we had spent almost two and a half years continuously either inside my childhood bedroom or sitting in a small tent in the garden. During the first year of grief, we could barely tolerate going anywhere without her. But there was something else too: our old car no longer had a valid inspection and Mart hardly dared drive it during the day anymore. Sometimes we still took Fannar out late at night, but otherwise we lived indoors. And on top of that, the year before, Fannar had become so terrified of fireworks that we felt we needed somewhere we could escape to.
Because our old car no longer passed inspection, Mart barely dared drive it during the day, so spontaneously going somewhere around New Year’s Eve no longer felt possible. We needed another vehicle. Not only because the old one was failing, but because we needed something that could take us farther away more often and for longer periods. Something that could help us live outside again, even if only a little. So we bought a camper. Not because we dreamed about travelling, but because we wanted a place where life might feel less heavy.
With the money we spent on the camper, we could also have repaired our current car. But emotionally we were nowhere near ready for that. Our girl had died inside that car. The idea of strangers working on it felt as if we would have to remove everything she had touched while cleaning it out. At that point we could not bear that. On top of that, it was winter. It had rained for weeks, everything was wet and muddy, and we believed we would soon leave anyway and therefore need more belongings with us than would fit inside a normal car. That is why it became a camper.
It was not even a camper that perfectly suited us. We chose a model with a huge amount of storage space because we thought we would spend long periods away in it. Mart is tall, so he needed to be able to stand upright if we ended up partly living inside it.
If we had known we would still be living for years inside my old room at my mother’s house, we probably would have chosen a smaller, newer camper. Something mainly for occasional escapes. But back then we truly believed we would leave soon. So we chose something that could function as a home.
Mart never drove it back home. We immediately parked it at the storage place where it is still standing now. The camper was still too filthy to use immediately, but that was not even the main reason. The real reason was that we did not want anyone nearby to know we had another camper. Our previous one had been seized and destroyed. We did not want that to happen again.
For the first weeks I could barely face looking at the camper. Our previous little house on wheels still lived too strongly inside me. Our girl had lived there. We had made memories there. The new camper did not feel like a fresh start. Our first camper already carried a whole history. I have written about that before. It was eventually taken away and destroyed, and maybe that is why this new camper never truly felt like a beginning. It felt like a replacement. So I stayed away.
Meanwhile Mart already went there every weekend to clean it. Alone. In the dark behind the flats. Wearing protective clothing, using a steam cleaner, buckets of water, cloths, alcohol and vinegar. Only after a few weeks did I finally go look at it for the first time. In the dark. And what I felt when I saw it was actually two things at once. Hope, because it briefly felt as though freedom might still exist somewhere ahead of us again, and pain, because it still resembled our old little house on wheels enough to hurt.
It felt as though we were trying to retrieve something that was already gone.
Later Mart said he actually would have preferred restoring our old little house on wheels with the money we spent on this camper. But at that time that was no longer possible. We had lived from benefits for over a year and a half and had nowhere to store it. Only later did a nearby storage place become available. We now live on two benefits and maybe things would have been different if that option had existed earlier. But at the time, our choices simply looked different.
When we still had our first little house on wheels, we also drove a different old car. A Suzuki Alto that was honestly even worse than the car we have now. After our camper was seized, we managed, with help from a friend, to buy our current car. Not because it was ideal, but because we could at least drive farther with it and carry more things than in the tiny Alto. That too was a decision made out of necessity, not luxury.
Looking back on the past years, I see how often we have tried to begin again. Sometimes with hope, sometimes simply because standing still no longer felt possible.
This camper was never a dream; it was simply a way of refusing to give up.