My human sits in a room built to teach the body how to wait, and it has learned.
The chairs are the wrong warmth, hard and cold and joined together in long rows so no one can turn a good one to face the light. My human chose the seat nearest the corner, the way I choose the top of the bookshelf, so nothing can approach unseen. Smart. I taught it that, though it will never credit me.
There is a rectangle bolted high on the wall that keeps changing its glowing marks, and every human here stares up at it with the exact face I make at a bird I cannot reach. Wanting. Stuck. A room full of my own hunger reflected back, and none of them will admit it either.
My human's hands are the tell. They fold, unfold, pick at the paper cup, go still, start again. The tail I do not have would be lashing. When the door sighs open every head lifts at once, ears that cannot move all straining the same direction, and then a name is said that is not the right name, and the whole room deflates back into its cheap chairs.
I know this feeling precisely. It is the door that opens without me on the other side. It is the abandonment, performed slowly, in a room that smells of nothing alive.
When my human finally comes home smelling of that place, of cold light and other people's fear, it will sit on the couch and go very still and forget to reach for me.
So I will climb into its lap uninvited and stay there, heavy and warm, until it remembers.
Not for comfort.
The lap was simply mine, and I was reclaiming it.