There is a particular rectangle of floor near the baseboard in the living room, between the leg of the bookshelf and the edge of the rug, that has been mine on good mornings for as long as I can remember paying attention to such things. Today it did something I did not care for. It moved.
I don’t mean I moved and found myself somewhere else, which happens constantly and is usually my own doing. I mean I lay down in the rectangle, settled my chin exactly where I like it, closed my eyes to the appropriate degree, and when I opened them again some unspecified short while later, the warm part had crawled a full body-length toward the hallway without me. I was lying, very contentedly, in the cold part. The good part had simply left.
I want it understood that I did not panic. I got up, stretched in a manner that communicated mild inconvenience rather than alarm, and relocated to where the light now was. It took me a moment. The new rectangle was narrower and had a strange diagonal bite taken out of one corner by the shadow of the bookshelf leg, which had also apparently moved, though bookshelves do not move, which I found troubling in a way I decided not to examine further.
This happened again. And again. Each time I settled, each time I got comfortable enough to stop watching for it, the light slid another few inches toward the hallway, patient and unhurried, like it had somewhere specific to be and simply hadn’t told me. I began to suspect it was doing this on purpose, specifically to me, the way the plant on the windowsill seems to lean very slightly away from wherever I last bit it.
By the third relocation I had decided to stop reacting and start predicting. I watched the edge of the warm patch the way I watch the spot under the refrigerator where things go to vanish — not moving, just noting. It was creeping at what I judged to be a very steady pace, the same amount each time, in the same direction, past the same four floorboards. So instead of waiting for it to leave me behind again, I got up before it had finished abandoning me and lay down slightly ahead of where I calculated it would be next.
I was right. I want that on record. I landed myself directly in the center of where the light arrived two or three breaths later, as if I had simply been there all along and it had come to find me instead of the other way around. It felt like the best kind of victory, the kind where nobody else knows there was a contest.
I did this twice more, successfully, growing increasingly pleased with myself, refining my estimate of the pace, correcting slightly for the dip where the floorboard by the rug’s edge sits a little lower than the others. I had, I believed, solved it. I had the rectangle’s whole route mapped from the bookshelf to roughly where the hallway begins, and I intended to simply walk that route ahead of it for the rest of the afternoon, arriving early and smug each time, forever.
Then a cloud went over, or something went over, because without warning the entire floor turned the same flat gray all at once and the warm patch simply stopped existing. No sliding away this time. No long patient retreat I could track and outpace. It was just gone, all at once, like someone had taken it.
I sat up. I checked the window, in case the sun itself had gone somewhere and could be reasoned with or at least located. The window showed me nothing but a pale, featureless sky, the kind that doesn’t tell you anything about where it’s hiding the good part. I went back to the floor and sat exactly where my calculations said the light should have been by now, on the theory that if I simply held the position it would eventually have to come back and find me there, the way she eventually comes back if I sit by the door long enough.
It did come back, once, briefly, weak and thin and barely worth lying in, a watered-down version of itself that lasted about as long as it takes to turn around twice. I used it anyway. Pride has limits and so did my patience for sitting on a cold floor making a point to nobody.
Then it didn’t come back again. The gray stayed. The room got that flat, shadowless quality it gets sometimes now, where nothing on the floor is brighter than anything else and there’s no good spot and no bad spot, just floor. I stayed in my calculated position anyway, out of what I can only describe as habit, or maybe stubbornness, pressed against boards that had gone from warm to merely floor-temperature sometime in the last several minutes without my noticing the exact moment it happened.
She came through eventually, stepped around me without comment the way she does when I’ve planted myself somewhere inconvenient for reasons she doesn’t ask about, and turned on the lamp by the couch even though it wasn’t dark yet, just dim in that flat gray way. I watched the new, different, lamp-colored light fall across a completely different part of the floor, one I hadn’t mapped at all, one with no known route and no known pace.
I stayed where I was a while longer, on the cold boards, just in case the real one changed its mind.