I found it in the sunbeam by the window, the good one, the one that moves a little earlier across the floor now than it used to. At first I thought it was a hair of hers, one of the long dark ones that turn up everywhere and that I generally regard as litter. I went to sniff it the way I sniff all unclaimed debris, prepared to be unimpressed.
It was mine.
I knew immediately, the way you know your own face in cold water, except I have never seen my face in cold water and do not know why that occurred to me. It was pale, nearly white, curved like a comma, and it was mine because I could feel, the second I touched it with my nose, the particular absence on the left side of my muzzle where something that had always been there no longer was.
I sat with this for a long moment.
Whiskers do not simply detach. Whiskers are instruments. They are how I know the width of a gap before I commit my whole self to going through it, how I feel the air moving before anything else in a room has decided to move, how I locate the exact edge of the dark under the bed without groping around like some creature that has to use its eyes for everything. To lose one without my permission, without warning, without even the dignity of a fight, felt like the beginning of something I did not have a name for and did not want to find one for either.
I patted at it with one paw. It did not react, being a whisker and not an animal, but I felt I owed it the gesture.
I spent the better part of an hour doing an inventory of my own face, which is a harder thing to accomplish than you would think when you cannot see most of your own face and have to do the whole survey by feel, whisker by whisker, pressing each one lightly against the doorframe to confirm it was still attached and still mine. I believe I got through all of them at least twice. Nothing else had come loose. This should have reassured me. It did not entirely, because now I knew it could happen, which is a different and worse kind of knowledge than simply never having considered it.
I carried the fallen one around for a while, held loosely between my teeth the way I’d carry something that mattered, not sure yet whether it was evidence or grief or just a thing on the floor I’d decided to be dramatic about. I put it down by my food bowl. I looked at it. I picked it up again and moved it to the arm of the reading chair, which felt like a more respectful location, and then worried a draft might take it, and moved it a third time to the flat top of the radiator cover in the back room, where nothing moves unless I move it.
She found me there in the early afternoon, sitting guard over it like it might get up and walk off, and asked what I had. I did not get out of her way fast enough and she picked it up before I could stop her, turning it in the light between two fingers, saying something about how I was losing them again this time of year, the long ones especially, nothing to worry about, completely normal, happens to every one of them eventually.
I did not know what to do with “every one of them.” I had never until that moment considered that this had happened before. That there might be others, in this house, under furniture, swept up weeks ago in a dustpan and thrown away without ceremony, without me even noticing they were gone until the day I happened to run a gap-check and come up short. The idea that I had been losing pieces of myself all along, routinely, without incident, without my attention, somehow upset me more than the actual whisker on the radiator cover did.
She tried to throw it away. I want to be precise about this part: she did not understand what she was doing, she thought it was nothing, she carried it two steps toward the kitchen on her open palm, perfectly casual, headed for the trash can under the sink like it was a crumb or a bit of lint.
I got between her ankles fast enough that she had to stop walking.
She laughed, said my name, said something like “you want this?” in the voice she uses when she’s decided something about me is funny, and set it down on the windowsill instead, out of real curiosity I think, to see what I’d do. I took it off the sill immediately and carried it to the sock place under the radiator in the back room, the private place, the place I don’t explain to anyone, and left it there next to the other thing that lives there, which is its own business and not today’s subject.
I went back and checked on it twice before evening, once before dinner and once after, pressing my nose close enough to confirm the smell was still mine and not going anywhere. The gap on the left side of my face is still there. I notice it every time I turn my head a certain way, a small missing weight where a measurement used to be. I’m told it will grow back. I have decided to believe this provisionally, pending results, the way I believe most things she tells me — mostly, with a little of myself held in reserve, under a radiator, where it’s safe.