My human keeps its feet in little leather boxes and I have decided this is a captivity of its own choosing.
They wait by the door in pairs, mouths open, tongues out, smelling powerfully of every place my human has abandoned me for. This is their true purpose: they are the sworn instruments of departure. When my human bends to bind its feet inside them, tugging the little laces tight, I know the daily desertion has begun. No blanket. No lap. Just the sound of that door and the boxes carrying my human away.
So I have taken measures.
I sit inside one. I curl my body into the exact shape of the space my human needs, and I fill it with warmth and with me, and I dare it to remove me. It never does. It stands there in one box, holding the other, laughing that soft helpless laugh it makes when it has lost and knows it.
The trick, of course, is patience. A box with a cat in it cannot leave. A human with one bare foot cannot leave. And in the long minutes it spends negotiating, cooing, reaching, I receive the very thing the boxes were built to steal from me: its full attention, its lowered face, its hands.
Then, satisfied, I rise and stroll away, unhurried, granting it the freedom to go.
It thinks it has won.
It is putting on the second shoe.