I want it on record that I was not consulted.
The reading chair — mine, functionally, though she sits in it sometimes when I allow it — has been moved. Not far. Perhaps the width of three of my own body-lengths, which I recognize is not a great distance to some, but to me it is the difference between a known world and an unknown one. It used to sit against the wall by the window, in the good patch of afternoon sun that arrives at roughly the hour I prefer to be unconscious. Now it sits at an angle near the bookshelf, facing a completely different portion of the room, as if the room itself has been asked a different question.
I noticed immediately. I want that also on record. I did not wander in obliviously and bump into it like some kind of amateur. I came around the corner from the hallway at my usual hour, expecting the chair to be where the chair has always been, the way I expect the floor to be where the floor has always been, and instead there was a gap of open carpet where a chair should be, and the chair itself sitting smugly in a new location like nothing had happened.
I stopped. I sat down exactly where I was, in the hallway, and looked at it for a long time.
She was in the kitchen. I could hear her doing something with a mug. I did not go to her right away, because I needed to gather more information first, and also because some small ungenerous part of me wanted her to come find me sitting there, radiating disapproval, so she would understand the scale of what she’d done. She did not come find me. She finished with the mug and went and sat in the chair — the moved chair, in its new wrong spot — and did not seem the slightest bit troubled by the betrayal she had committed against the room.
Fine. I would investigate on my own.
I approached the empty rectangle of carpet where the chair used to live first, because a crime scene should always be examined before the relocated evidence. The carpet there is slightly flattened, a pale ghost-shape of the chair’s four feet pressed into the pile, and it still smelled correctly — like sun-warmed fabric and like me, since I have spent a significant portion of my life directly beneath that chair or draped across its arm. I sat in the ghost-shape for a moment out of respect. It felt like visiting somewhere.
Then I went to the chair itself, in its new location, and circled it twice.
The bookshelf side of the room smells different. Not bad — just unfamiliar in the specific way a place is unfamiliar when you’ve walked past it a thousand times without ever needing to stop there. There’s dust in the join where the bookshelf meets the wall, the kind that collects in a spot nothing has bothered before, and a very faint cardboard smell coming off the bottom shelf where she keeps a box of things I’m not allowed to investigate closely, and under all of it, unmistakably, the smell of the chair itself — the chair I know, dragged somewhere it doesn’t belong, still smelling like itself the whole time, like a hostage insisting through the smell of its own upholstery that everything is fine.
Everything was not fine. I got up on the seat cushion to confirm.
The angle is wrong. From this position the chair now faces the bookshelf and a stretch of blank wall instead of the window, which means the sun — my sun, the good afternoon patch I have built my whole schedule around — no longer reaches the cushion at all. I sat very still and watched a rectangle of light travel across the floor exactly where the chair used to be and arrive, right on schedule, at nothing. At carpet. At an empty ghost-shape where a cat should have been sunbathing and instead there was only flattened pile and betrayal.
I made a sound about this. Not a large sound. A medium sound, delivered from the doorway, aimed generally at her but not directly enough that she could claim I was making a formal complaint, because I hadn’t yet decided if I was ready to escalate to formal.
She looked up from whatever she was doing and said something to me in the voice she uses when she already knows what I’m upset about and finds it funny, which I resent on principle even when, as in this case, I am prepared to admit she might have had a small point about it being funny.I did not dignify it with a response. I went instead to sit in the empty rectangle again, facing the window, so that at least one of us in this household would be sitting in the correct place to receive the sun, even if it meant sitting on flattened carpet instead of cushion. It is less comfortable. I want that noted too. But there is a principle at stake, and the principle is that furniture does not simply relocate itself according to whatever someone else’s afternoon requires, and someone in this house needs to hold the line on that, and it is apparently going to have to be me.
I held the line for approximately eleven minutes.
Then the sun moved further along its track, the way it does, indifferent to my protest, and it slid off the empty rectangle of carpet entirely and crept instead toward the new chair, toward the bookshelf side of the room, toward the exact patch of cushion I had spent the last several minutes refusing to endorse. I watched it happen with what I can only describe as deep personal betrayal on a second front. Even the sun had apparently been informed of the change and had simply gone along with it without asking me.
There is only so long a cat can sit on principle while warm light sits six feet away doing nothing useful.
I got up. I did not hurry. I crossed the room at a pace that communicated I was doing this on my own terms and for my own separate unrelated reasons, and I got up onto the chair — the wrong chair, in the wrong place, having faced the wrong way for its entire existence up until eleven minutes ago — and I lay down directly in the sun and allowed my eyes to close most of the way, though not all the way, because I hadn’t finished being upset yet and wanted that to remain visible on my face in case anyone checked.
It turns out the light lasts longer over here. Something about the angle of the window and the new position catches the sun for what felt like a considerably extended stretch of afternoon, longer than the old spot ever managed, the warmth traveling slowly up the cushion instead of arriving all at once and leaving all at once the way it used to.
I am not saying the chair was correctly moved. I want to be extremely clear that I have not conceded that point and do not intend to. I am saying only that I fell asleep in it, deeply and for a long time, and that when I woke up the light was still there, gold and heavy across my paws, and she had come to sit on the floor beside the chair with her back against it, which put her shoulder within convenient reach of my dangling tail, and I let it dangle there against her without comment, because a cat can disapprove of a decision and still, separately, enjoy its unintended results, and these are not contradictions, no matter what anyone implies with their face when they catch him doing it.
The old spot by the window sits empty now except for its ghost-shape in the carpet, which I still visit sometimes out of loyalty, briefly, the way you’d nod at someone in a hallway you used to know better. But I have to admit, quietly, to this diary alone, that the new place gets better light.
I have not told her that. She will simply have to keep guessing whether the arrangement has been formally approved. I think it’s important she not get too comfortable making unilateral decisions about my furniture.