The hour the cat understood

At 2:14 the cat came in from the other room and sat on the desk between me and the page, which is a thing she has never done before. She is not a sentimental animal. She tolerates me the way I tolerate the radiator: a necessary noise.

She sat on the page and put her paw on my wrist and looked at me with the disinterest of an old friend. I stopped writing. I don't know what I would have written if she hadn't come in. Something self-pitying, probably. Something I would have deleted in the morning and felt embarrassed about for an hour and then forgotten until now.

I didn't pet her. We sat there. The radiator did its work. The window had that wet glow it gets when the streetlight catches the condensation. After a while she got up and went back to the other room without looking at me.

I think the cat saved me from a paragraph. That is not nothing. That is the whole job some nights.