Hope knows before I do.
She knows when the day will be hard before I open my eyes — she's already there, already arranged herself along the curve of my body like a comma in a sentence that needed a pause.
She knows when the waiting room has been too much. She doesn't ask about it. She simply increases the purr by one frequency and stays closer than usual and occasionally touches her nose to my cheek, which is the whole of what medicine should be and largely isn't.
She knows the difference between the silence that is peace and the silence that is danger. She monitors both.
---
They said: you are too sensitive. They said: you feel things too much. They said: you need to develop a thicker skin, a filter, a wall, a managed interior —
Hope looked at them from the gatepost with the patience of someone who has been watching humans make this mistake for ten thousand years
and said nothing, because she is a cat, and also because she knew I would figure it out eventually.
---
What Hope knows:
That the lap is sacred. That the purr is medicine. That showing up is the whole curriculum. That choosing someone — really choosing them, every day, with your whole warm body — is the most theological act available to a creature without language.
That the gate was never the point. That the garden always was.
---
She chose me when I needed choosing.
Not the me that had the magazine, the NYT years, the right address. The me that had nothing but a small flat and a large grief and, it turned out, a lap —
a lap that was, apparently, exactly what was needed.
*The cream-nosed empress knew what she was doing.* *She always does.*