My human came home from the retreat softer than usual, and I do not trust it.
For seven sunrises it was gone, and I ran the house alone: patrolled the windowsills, held down the good chair, kept the second cat in the mirror properly terrified. Then it returned smelling of wet stone, scented smoke, and other people's palms. It has learned to fold itself onto the floor now. On a mat. My floor. Its own tail nowhere to be found, its spine curled into shapes I invented before it was born.
It calls this "finding stillness." I have watched it flail after a laser dot. It has not found anything.
Worst is the breathing. It sits with its eyes closed and its hands upturned on its knees, pushing air out through its nose in long, deliberate hisses, as though warning off a rival that is not there. I am the only rival here. I know this because I am on the mat, in the exact center of its careful crossed legs, in the warm bowl its body has kindly assembled for me.
It opened one eye. Whispered that it was "trying to be present."
I am always present. Presence is the only thing I do. It flew across the world and paid strangers to teach it a discipline I perform in a sunbeam for free, and it still cannot hold the pose past a phone's first buzz.
It reached down to move me. I let its hand hover, warm and hopeful, above my back.
Then I stood, stretched into a shape it will never manage, and left the mat entirely, so it could practice its stillness without the one thing that gives stillness any point.