My human has found a long wooden shelf outdoors, at the wrong height, made of splinters, and has decided this is where it wishes to sit and think about nothing.
It could sit anywhere. It owns a great many soft places, all of which are mine, but it chose this: a hard plank facing a stretch of grass it will not roll in, watching birds it will not catch, breathing the cold like some sad indoor plant carried outside to be aired.
There are slats. Gaps between the wood, wide enough that a warm human bottom is only half-supported and the other half hangs into open air. Cruel. If I sat this way I would fall, and I do not fall.
Others of its kind pass by. My human watches them the way I watch a sparrow through the glass: wanting, motionless, saying nothing. It will not approach. It will not pounce. It simply sits, radiating heat into a bench that cannot appreciate it, when I am at home, cold, waiting on a windowsill for the one warm lap I am owed.
It calls this rest. I call it a lap, wasted.
So tonight, when it returns smelling of wind and pigeons and hopeful loneliness, and lowers itself into the good chair, and finally opens the blanket for me: I will step onto its knee, turn twice, and lie down facing away.
Let it look at my back for a while.
It should know how the bench felt.