It rained all day today, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with thunder or drama, just starts sometime before I’m properly awake and keeps going without checking in. I noticed it first as a change in the light coming through the back room window — flatter, grayer, like someone had put a thin cloth over the sun and forgotten to take it off.
I spent most of the morning on the sill watching it. There’s a particular pane in that window with a small imperfection near the bottom corner, a little bubble in the glass or a scratch, I’ve never worked out which, and rain does something strange when it hits that spot. Most drops run straight down in more or less the path you’d expect. The ones that land near the flaw stall out, sit there fattening for a while, then suddenly dart sideways before continuing down, as if they’d changed their mind about something. I watched maybe thirty of them do this. I did not get tired of it.
My human was around for parts of the day but not doing anything I could get invested in. There was a stretch where I heard her in the kitchen for a long time without much happening — a cupboard, a pause, the tap, another long pause — and I went to check and found her just standing there looking out the window over the sink at the exact same rain I’d been watching, arms crossed, not doing anything with her hands. I sat by her feet for a while in case she wanted company for it. She didn’t say anything and neither did I, which felt like the correct amount of talking for the occasion.
By early afternoon I’d moved off the sill, which had gotten cold in the way it does when the glass is holding weather instead of sun, and relocated to the middle of the hallway rug, which is not a place I have any particular attachment to but which was, at that specific hour, the only surface in the house that felt like the right temperature. I stretched out fully there, further than I usually bother to, back legs out straight behind me in a way that would embarrass me if anyone important saw it, and slept hard enough that I lost track of the rain entirely.
I woke up once to the sound of it picking up — a harder patter against the window in the other room, briefly loud enough that I lifted my head and held very still to listen, decided it wasn’t asking anything of me, and put my head back down. I woke up a second time to almost no sound at all, just a dripping somewhere outside, off the edge of something, slow and irregular, plink and then a long gap and then plink again. I don’t know how long I lay there matching my breathing to it without deciding to. It isn’t the kind of thing you decide.
At some point the light in the hallway changed color, the way it does late in an overcast day, going from gray to a deeper, bruised sort of gray that isn’t quite evening yet but is done pretending to be afternoon. I felt it more than saw it, a shift in temperature against my fur, and rolled onto my other side without fully waking, which is a specific skill I have and am proud of.
Nothing else happened. No sounds worth investigating, nothing crinkled or crashed or arrived at the door, no strange smells worked their way into the house that needed accounting for. My human made herself something in the kitchen around the time the light changed and I heard the particular clatter of a pan against the stove grate, and I thought about getting up for it and then didn’t, because getting up seemed like a much bigger project than staying where I was on the rug, warm now, dry, pleasantly heavy in a way that had nothing wrong with it.
Eventually she came and found me there, which I liked more than I expected to. She didn’t pick me up or move me anywhere, just crouched down next to the rug for a minute with her hand resting flat on my side, feeling me breathe, I assume, the way she sometimes does when she isn’t saying anything. The rain was still going, quieter now, more of a background hum than a performance. I didn’t open my eyes the whole time she was there. I kept them closed on purpose, so she’d think I was properly asleep and stay a little longer, which is a small dishonesty I feel no need to apologize for.
She got up eventually to do something in another room, and I heard the sound of it fade down the hall, and the rug went back to being just a rug with a cat on it, and the rain kept doing whatever rain does when nobody in the house is watching it anymore.