My human has brought home a paper collar it wears around its wrist, and now the whole apartment reeks of ambition.
It happens every year when the days go cold and the sun leaves my favorite windowsill too early. Something snaps in the human. It buys the tight skins again, fills a jug with water it will carry to a warehouse full of other water, and announces, to no one, to me, to the refrigerator, that this year is different.
I have seen thirty-one of these mornings now. I know how the story ends. There is a fever in the first two weeks, a great flurry of leaving and returning, of tired collapses onto my blanket without permission. Then the mornings get quiet. The tight skins migrate to the floor of the closet. The paper collar keeps buzzing on the counter, unanswered, like a small trapped insect the human is too ashamed to look at.
The warehouse does not care. It has already been paid. It will keep taking its tithe every month, patient as I am, waiting out the human's little resolutions the way I wait out a closed door.
I do not need a new year to begin a discipline. I have kept the same one since kittenhood: sit where it is warm, refuse what bores me, permit nothing that does not serve me.
The paper collar buzzed again on the counter this morning, blinking its needy little light, begging to be acknowledged.
So I acknowledged it. One paw. It's under the couch now, with the others.