I came downstairs this morning to find my bowl had been replaced with an impostor, and nobody had thought to ask me first.
The old bowl was deep and blue and had a small chip along the rim I’d long ago decided gave it character. It had been there, in that exact spot on the kitchen floor, for the entire duration of my memory. I do not say this lightly. That bowl and I had an understanding. In its place sat something wide, shallow, and unreasonably white, with a thin gray ring on the bottom I could feel was meant to stop it sliding, as if sliding had ever once been a problem either of us complained about.
She was at the counter doing something with coffee and didn’t even look over when I arrived to survey the scene.
I want it on record that I did not simply eat from it. I’m not an animal who can be swapped a new object overnight and expected to proceed as though nothing has happened. I circled it twice. I sat down next to it with my back very straight, the way I sit when I intend to communicate displeasure without resorting to anything undignified like yowling. I looked at her. She was still not looking at me. This is the trouble with protests conducted entirely through posture — they require a witness, and witnesses are often drinking coffee with their backs turned.
Eventually I put my face near it, mostly to confirm it smelled wrong, which it did, faintly — plastic, warehouse, the inside of a box. Nothing like the old bowl, which by now smelled almost entirely like me, built up over what I assume was a very long and important span of time, layer on layer, a bowl that had become mine in the way objects become yours when you’ve breathed on them enough times.
I did not eat. I went and sat under the kitchen table instead, where I could keep an eye on the situation without being seen to endorse it.
She noticed around midmorning, crouching down to look at me with the specific voice she uses when she thinks I’m being ridiculous, which I resent precisely because she is usually right and I have not yet found a way to stop her from being right. She said something about my whiskers. I didn’t like being discussed in the third person while sitting six inches away, but I let it go.
By the time hunger got the better of dignity — early afternoon, somewhere in that stretch where the light through the back window goes thin and gold and makes it hard to maintain a grudge about anything — I approached the new bowl the way I approach anything I intend to dislike on principle: slowly, and with my ears doing most of the talking.
And here is the humiliating part, which I debated leaving out entirely and have decided to include anyway, because this diary is nothing if not honest. The old bowl was deep enough that my whiskers used to press flat against the sides every time I lowered my face into it, a sensation I had never thought about because I had never known anything different, the way you don’t think about a door being heavy until someone hands you a lighter one. The new bowl is wide enough that my face fits into it without my whiskers touching anything at all. There is simply food, and then air, and then my face, with nothing pressing in on either side.
I ate more of it than I meant to prove a point about, which undermined the point considerably.
I would like to be clear that this does not mean I have forgiven the method. A bowl of this significance should have been discussed. There should have been some kind of transitional period, an overlap, perhaps both bowls present for a week so I could choose at my own pace rather than being presented with a fait accompli on a Thursday. Instead I was simply expected to adapt, the way I am apparently expected to adapt to a great many things in this house that are decided while I am asleep on the couch.
Still. I went back to it twice more before evening, once out of actual hunger and once, I’ll admit, out of curiosity, just to confirm the whisker thing wasn’t some trick of the first encounter. It wasn’t a trick. My face fits into that bowl like it was built around the specific dimensions of my face, which I suppose, in a sense I’m choosing not to examine too closely, it was.
The old bowl has been moved to the counter by the sink, rinsed and set upside down to dry, waiting either to be put away somewhere I won’t find it or to be brought back out for a houseguest I’ve never heard of and would almost certainly dislike. I went and sat beneath the counter for a while this evening, looking up at its blue underside, feeling something I don’t have a tidy name for — not grief exactly, more like the particular unease of watching a retired thing get quietly filed away while you’re still deciding how you feel about its replacement.
Then she called me for dinner, in the new bowl, in the usual spot, and I went, because I was hungry, and because my whiskers, it turns out, have opinions of their own that don’t always consult me either.