She moved the coffee table today. Not far — maybe two feet, enough to clear a rectangle of open floor in the living room — but far enough that it now sits half over the vent, which I consider a separate offense entirely and plan to address later. First things first. I needed to understand what the rectangle was for.
I assumed, reasonably, that something had gotten loose in the house. A bug, a dropped object, something worth clearing a hunting ground for. I took up a position at the edge of the rug and waited for her to produce whatever it was she intended to chase.
Instead she lay down on the floor. On her back. In the middle of the open rectangle, arms out, just breathing.
I want to say I understood immediately that this was intentional and not some kind of collapse, but the truth is I crossed the room at a fairly urgent pace and put my face very close to hers to check. She opened one eye, said something reassuring in the particular tone she uses when she thinks I’ve misjudged a situation, and closed it again. Fine. Not a collapse. I withdrew to a supervisory distance and sat down to see what came next.
What came next was worse, in the sense that it made less sense.
She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up so her whole body formed a kind of tent, hands flat on the floor, rear end in the air, head down between her arms. This is not a position I have ever seen a person hold on purpose. My first thought was that something had gone wrong with her spine. My second thought, when she held it — not for a second, not for a correction, but for a long, deliberate stretch of time — was that it might be a display of some kind. Aimed at me. I have no other explanation for why a grown woman would fold herself in half in the middle of the living room floor and stay there.
I approached the tent from underneath. This seemed like the responsible thing to do, given that nobody else was going to investigate the structural integrity of it. She made a small surprised noise when my head appeared between her hands and said my name in the voice that means I am in the way, which I don’t entirely accept, because I was in the one place in the room that hadn’t been investigated yet.
She unfolded, resettled, and did it again a moment later, differently — lower this time, chest nearly to the floor, one leg stretched long behind her. I sat directly in front of her face so she would know I was monitoring. She looked at me through the gap under her own arm with an expression I couldn’t place.
Then she went still for the longest stretch yet, face down, arms folded under her forehead, not moving at all. This one worried me. The tent position was strange but upright and clearly effortful. This one looked like giving up. I climbed onto the curve of her back without much of a plan beyond being there, in case being there was the thing that was needed. She exhaled underneath me, a long breath that moved my whole body with it, and didn’t tell me to get down, so I stayed.
I want to note that I was not light about it, and she did not seem to mind, which I took as confirmation that this was in fact the correct response to the position she’d chosen. I settled my front paws against her shoulder blade. Her back rose and fell, rose and fell. Somewhere in the kitchen a tap was dripping at its usual uneven interval and I let it mark time instead of counting it myself, which is as close as I get to being calm about something I don’t understand.
She got up eventually, which displaced me without ceremony, and went through a few more shapes I didn’t try to classify — something with her arms reaching overhead, something with one foot pressed flat against the inside of her other leg while she stood very still and looked mildly unbalanced about it. I abandoned the supervisory posture by then and just watched from the arm of the couch, tail wrapped around my feet, because frankly the whole sequence had stopped making sense as a single coherent event and started looking more like something she does for herself, with no outward purpose at all, the way I sometimes walk the length of the hallway for no reason except that the hallway is there.
When she finally sat down on the floor again — properly sat, cross-legged, done — she was breathing harder than when she started and there was a faint shine on her forehead I don’t usually see outside of warm afternoons. I came down off the couch arm and put myself directly in her lap without asking, which she allowed, scratching behind my ear in the specific absent way that means her attention is still partly somewhere else, winding down from wherever the floor shapes had taken her.
I don’t know what any of it accomplished. I don’t think it was aimed at me, in the end, though I held out hope for a while that the tent position in particular had been some kind of message. But I was there for the whole thing, every shape, every long still stretch where she went somewhere I couldn’t follow, and when she came back to herself at the end she reached for me first, before the water glass on the side table, before anything else in the room. I count that for something.
The coffee table is still over the vent. I’ll deal with that tomorrow.