I was asleep on the arm of the couch, which is a narrow perch that requires a certain amount of commitment to stay on, and I want it noted that under normal circumstances I manage it without incident. The sun had moved onto the cushion in that lazy afternoon way it does, warm through the fur on one side and not the other, and I had tucked my paws under myself in the configuration that means I am not to be disturbed for any reason short of the house being on fire.
I was chasing something.
I don’t know what it was. That’s the honest, ungovernable truth of it. It moved low and fast along the floor of a hallway that was our hallway and also wasn’t — longer than it should have been, dimmer, the doorways in the wrong places — and every time I got close it would flick sideways and be gone around a corner that hadn’t been there a second before. I was fast. I want that part on the record too. I was faster than I have ever been in my life, low to the ground, ears flat, gaining, and there was a specific feeling in my chest of being right on the edge of catching it, that held-breath feeling where the whole world narrows down to one small moving thing.
I got a paw on it. I’m almost sure I got a paw on it.
And then the floor wasn’t there.
What actually happened, I’ve since worked out, is that somewhere in the chase my body decided to participate without checking with me first, and I made an actual lunge off the arm of the couch — a real one, with real legs — toward something that existed only in the hallway that wasn’t our hallway. There was a horrible weightless second where I was airborne and had no idea why, followed immediately by the floor arriving much sooner and much harder than any floor has ever arrived before, and then I was lying next to the coffee table with all four legs pointed in directions I hadn’t authorized, blinking up at a ceiling that was, infuriatingly, just our ceiling.
For a moment I genuinely could not tell you where I was. That’s the part I don’t love admitting. The hallway had been so complete, so full of doorways and shadow and the specific downhill lean of the chase, that our actual living room — the rug, the table leg an inch from my face, the particular smell of the cushion I’d just fallen off of — took a second to reassemble itself into something I recognized. I lay there working it out. Couch. Rug. Table. Mine. Fine.
She’d heard the thump from the kitchen. I heard her footsteps change direction, heard the particular quickness that means she thinks something is wrong, and by the time she came around the doorway I had gotten myself upright and was sitting with what I hoped read as intention, as though I had chosen the floor, as though the floor and I had an arrangement.
“What happened,” she said, not really a question, crouching down. She has a way of asking things that already know their own answer.
I looked at her. I did not have an explanation that would survive being said out loud. There is no dignified way to report that you fell off a piece of furniture pursuing something that was never real, in a hallway that has never existed, at a speed you cannot currently reproduce while awake. So I said nothing, which is generally my strongest move.
She ran a hand down my back, once, slow, the way she does when she’s checking that all my parts are still where they belong. “You were really going for it,” she said. “Your legs were going like crazy.” And there was something in the way she said it — not laughing exactly, but close to it, fond in a way that had a laugh folded up somewhere inside it — that told me she’d been watching for a while before the fall. That the whole thing, the twitching paws, the little sounds I apparently make, had been visible to her the entire time I thought I was alone in that hallway.
I found this unsettling in a way I’m still turning over. It hadn’t occurred to me that the chase had an audience. In my experience things either happen where she can see them, in which case they’re real and count, or they happen privately, in which case they’re mine. This was neither. It had felt entirely private, entirely mine, more mine than almost anything that’s happened to me all week — and the whole time she’d been sitting six feet away watching my legs go.
She didn’t make a production of it. She scooped me up, which under other circumstances I would have objected to on principle, and settled back onto the couch with me arranged against her the way I generally allow, and went back to whatever she’d been doing before the thump interrupted her, one hand resting flat on my side. I could feel my own heart still going faster than it should have been for a cat who had, as far as the room was concerned, done nothing but nap.
I kept thinking about the hallway. Whether it would be there again if I went back to sleep, whether the thing I never quite saw would still be around that corner waiting, whether I’d get closer next time or whether it would always flick away at exactly that same distance. It felt important, somehow, in the specific way things feel important right after you wake up from them and before the day has had a chance to talk you out of it.
I didn’t go back to sleep, in the end. I stayed where I was, against her side, feeling the small movements of whatever she was doing with her free hand, and let the afternoon light finish crossing the cushion without me in it. My legs still felt faintly electric, like they hadn’t fully agreed the chase was over. Every so often one paw would twitch on its own, small and involuntary, and I’d feel it happen the way you’d feel someone else’s hand move.