My human has taken everything soft out of the box-shaped den and put it into other boxes, and now the whole territory echoes when I walk it, which is undignified. A cat should not be able to hear its own feet.
There is nothing to sit upon. The tall thing I claimed by the window, gone. The soft platform where the human slept and I permitted it to sleep near me, gone. Only the flat cold floor and the smell of a place that has decided to forget us.
My human is not sleeping. It lies on a heap of the boxed-up soft things in the middle of the empty room, wide-eyed, listening to the room be empty the way I am listening. Good. It finally understands what I have always known: that a space without me arranged in the center of it is not truly finished.
It keeps reaching for the glowing rectangle, then setting it down. No one inside the rectangle is coming to fill this room. Only I can do that.
So I walked the whole cold perimeter, once, slowly, claiming every echoing corner. Then I climbed onto the human's chest, where it is warmest, and pressed until the reaching stopped.
There. Now there is a cat in the middle of the room.
Now it is a den.