I want it on record that I was awake first. I am always awake first, technically, in the sense that I never fully stop being awake, but this morning I was awake in the specific, aggrieved way of someone who has been personally wronged before the sun has even finished coming up. The alarm went off wrong. Not wrong in tone — she has always had that same thin, polite little chime, the one I have learned to treat as background noise, the one that means nothing is required of me yet. This morning it went off at a completely different hour, in the dark, in the part of the night that still smells like night, and I sat straight up on the bed like I’d been called into court.
She got up immediately. That’s the part that alarmed me most. Normally there is a period — sometimes a very long, satisfying period — where she groans and rolls over and I get to walk purposefully across her ribs to remind her that time is passing and I am hungry within that time. This morning there was none of that. She was up, feet on the floor, moving through the dark room with the brisk, no-nonsense energy of someone being chased, except nothing was chasing her except the six minutes she seemed determined to beat.
Six minutes. I don’t know where I got that number. It felt correct at the time, the way a lot of my numbers do.
I followed her into the bathroom, then the closet, then the kitchen, doing what I consider a reasonable amount of narrating — a low, ongoing commentary meant to convey both my confusion and my displeasure at being confused — and she barely looked at me. She fed me, to her credit, but it was the fast version of feeding me, the version where the bowl gets set down almost before it’s finished being filled, no scratch behind the ear first, no “good morning, handsome,” none of the little ceremonial things that make breakfast into breakfast instead of just food appearing. I ate it anyway. I’m not an animal about principles.
Then she left. Early. Dark-outside early. I stood at the front window and watched the shape of her go down the front steps carrying a bag I did not recognize, a woven one with something rolled up and sticking out of the top of it, blue, ridged along its length like a length of hose but clearly not a hose, clearly some kind of mat, and I have thought about that mat for most of the day since and arrived at no conclusions I feel confident sharing. It smelled, when I checked the spot on the hallway floor where the bag had briefly rested, like nothing I’ve encountered before — a flat, rubbery, slightly sweet smell with something sharper underneath it, and rather than pretend I recognized it, I will say plainly that I did not, and that I found this more unsettling than a smell I could name.
The house without her in it at that hour is a different house. I want to be clear that I am used to her leaving — I am not a cat who falls apart at an empty room, whatever certain unnamed insinuations from certain corners of my life might suggest — but I am used to her leaving at a particular point in the morning, after a particular sequence of things has happened, and none of that sequence happened today. It had all been shuffled forward, compressed, like someone had taken the whole shape of my day and folded it wrong.
I spent the empty hours doing what I could. I checked the box on the bottom bookshelf, which remains off-limits and unyielding and smelling only of cardboard, no new information there. I sat in the reading chair in its new spot by the bookshelf, out of the sun, and found it acceptable but not forgiven. I checked on the spider, who was fine, who is always fine, who does not seem to have a morning schedule at all and I envy that. Mostly I patrolled. I want to say I patrolled with purpose, monitoring the doors and the windows for any sign that this disruption was the leading edge of something larger, some new and permanent rearrangement of how the day would go from here on, but if I’m honest a lot of the patrolling was just walking from room to room being upset in each one individually.
She came home later than the coming-home I’m used to, too, which meant the whole day had shifted its shape on both ends, like someone had picked up the entire schedule and set it down again a little to the left. She came in smelling completely unlike herself — sharp, damp, a cleaned-off version of her usual smell with something newer sitting on top of it, hair pulled back and slightly wet at the edges, a person-shaped question mark standing in the front hallway.
I did not run to her immediately. I want that noted too. I sat where I was, on the arm of the reading chair, and made her come to me, which she did, dropping the woven bag by the door and crouching down with her hands out, saying my name in the voice she uses when she already knows I’ve had an opinion about something and finds it funny in advance. I let her scratch under my chin for slightly longer than strictly necessary before I forgave her, mostly because up close, underneath the sharp new smell, she still smelled like herself, and that turned out to matter more than the rest of it.
The evening went back to something like normal. Dinner happened at the usual time, in the usual way, with the ceremony restored — the scratch first, then the bowl, then the little pause where she watches me eat like she’s checking something off a list. By the time we were on the couch, her feet tucked under her, me arranged along her side the way I’ve taken to doing lately, the whole morning had shrunk down into something almost forgivable, a strange bracket around an otherwise ordinary day.
I don’t know if tomorrow’s alarm will go off wrong again in the same way. I have decided, provisionally, to treat it as a single incident rather than the start of a pattern, mostly because deciding otherwise would mean getting up early enough to stand at the window and watch for the woven bag again, and even a cat with my sense of duty needs to pick his battles. But I’ll be listening for that chime. If it goes off wrong two mornings running, I reserve the right to escalate my concerns considerably.