I want it on the record that I have made that jump before. Many times. It is not a difficult jump. The bookshelf is not especially tall, and I am not especially small, and the two facts have always balanced each other out in my favor. I have landed on top of that bookshelf with total confidence more times than I could possibly count, usually to survey the room from an appropriately elevated position, sometimes just to remind the framed photograph up there who it answers to.
This morning was not one of those times.
I don’t know what went wrong. I have turned it over from every angle and I still cannot locate the failure. I had the distance measured. I had the crouch. I had, if I’m honest, a small flourish planned for the landing, a little twist of the back half that I do sometimes when I know I’m being watched, and I did know I was being watched, because she was sitting right there in the reading chair with her coffee, which is exactly the sort of audience a jump like that deserves.
I left the floor. That part happened correctly. Everything after that is where things went wrong in ways I still can’t fully account for.
I believe what occurred is that my back legs, which are usually reliable and have never once given me any trouble, simply declined to finish the job they’d started. I got most of the way there. I got, in fact, close enough to see the top of the bookshelf clearly, close enough to have already begun mentally composing the look I would give her once I’d landed, and then instead of arriving I found myself sliding back down the front of it with my claws doing something loud and undignified to the wood, and then I was on the floor, and the framed photograph was on the floor, face down, next to me, having apparently decided to come along for the ride.
She laughed. I want to be very clear about the kind of laugh it was, because there is a difference between the laugh she gives me when I do something charming on purpose and the laugh she gave me this morning, which was the other kind, the kind with her hand actually coming up to her mouth, the kind that has no dignity extended toward me whatsoever.
I did not look at her. This was a deliberate choice, not an oversight. I sat exactly where I had landed, in the very center of the rug, and began grooming my left shoulder with the sort of unhurried, deeply focused attention that communicates I meant to do that and also I am extremely busy and also do not speak to me right now. It is a technique I have used before with mixed success. I don’t know that anyone has ever fully believed it. I keep using it anyway, because the alternative is admitting something happened, and nothing happened. A cat sat down. That is all that occurred here.
She got up to right the photograph, which had landed face down but not broken, thankfully, and set it back where it belonged, and on her way back to the chair she reached down and scratched behind my ear, which I permitted, because refusing it would have suggested I was upset, and I was not upset, I was simply grooming.
The rest of the morning I spent recovering. Not physically — physically I was, and remain, completely fine, magnificent even, unmarked by the entire episode. The recovery I mean is the other kind. I went and sat on the arm of the couch for a while, which is a lower and less impressive perch but one I have never once fallen off of, and made a point of looking extremely comfortable there, the way a cat looks when he has chosen the arm of the couch on purpose and was never trying to be anywhere else.
Then, because I felt the record needed correcting, I got up an hour or so later and did the jump again. Properly this time. I want that noted too. I did not skip it, I did not quietly reroute my ambitions toward some smaller, safer surface for the rest of my life the way a lesser animal might. I lined it up exactly as before, I left the floor exactly as before, and I landed on top of that bookshelf clean and solid and correct, four paws, no sound, the photograph not even trembling in its frame this time. She wasn’t in the room to see it, which is somehow both a relief and an outrage. A relief because there were no witnesses to compare it against the first attempt. An outrage because the whole performance was, strictly speaking, wasted.
I stayed up there a long time after that, longer than I usually do, looking down at the room from the correct height, feeling the specific kind of satisfaction that only comes from fixing something nobody but you knows was broken.
Later, when she came back through, I made sure to be visibly up there already, settled, composed, one paw tucked under, gazing out over the bookshelf’s territory like I’d never left it. She looked up at me and said something about how nice it was that I’d gotten myself back up, in a voice that had entirely too much amusement folded into it for my taste, like she knew exactly what the second jump had been for.
I did not dignify that with a response. I simply continued looking out over the room, from my correct and rightful position, the way I have always done, the way nothing this morning had ever once interrupted.