Claiming, Not Owning
“I must have a lie-down.”
She appeared without warning, as she often does, her voice landing before I had quite registered her presence.
I was quite busy with work at the moment she said it and really only half-heard her, my eyes transfixed on my laptop screen. I think I said something about joining her in an hour or so.
But she wouldn’t hear of it.
“Am I not here for you whenever I can?” she prompted firmly, her thin brow furrowed, her voice edged with displeasure at my dismissiveness.
It was about a quarter past three in the afternoon, and I was in the middle of some very focused work requiring a state of mind almost immune to interruption. Almost. She was not demanding. Not commanding. Asking — in her own way.
And in that mindset, I had responded to her request with the demeanor of a bureaucrat, using words that placated, deferring to a more convenient time.
I had no answer that wasn’t evasion. So I put down what I was doing.
For in that moment, I understood: she was making a claim. On me. On our relationship. Her ask was grounded in the history of us, in all of the times she had come when I called, had stayed when I needed her to stay, had been present in the small hours when presence was the only thing that helped.
Now, what she expected wasn’t compliance or obedience, but reciprocity.
⁂
Her face may have shown disappointment, but her eyes showed the need.
I made a space for us and motioned for her to lie with me. She crept under the blanket with that feline quality she displays without self-consciousness or effort — claiming the space she knows only she can inhabit.
Beside me, I could feel her fatigue. Exhaustion even. Not described but transmitted. The way a stone can radiate heat or cold. The unspoken language of two people who have known each other a long time, felt through weight and warmth.
Her back was slightly cold. Instinctively, I pulled her close. She made a small sound in response — the subtle kind that could mean a hundred things in anyone else, but in hers it was approval.
And then she was fast asleep.
There was nothing else I needed to do in that moment. No words. No solutions. No interpretation. She was simply there, and I was holding her, and she was asleep, content in my arms.
There is something in watching a person sleep that clarifies the difference between possession and belonging. Possession would exploit what’s given — her weight, her tenderness, her unguardedness. Belonging protects it.
I hadn’t known I was tired. But my breathing found hers, and then I too was asleep.
⁂
She was gone when I awoke. An emptiness where her form had been just an hour before. Once again, I felt the proof of her presence in the void of her absence — that too is a claim.
I am still working out what it means that someone can know you need rest when you don’t know it yourself. To be seen more precisely than you see yourself is disorienting — and, once you stop resisting it, something more than sanctuary.
What she claims, she does not keep. What she keeps, she does not own. She simply holds it — the way you hold something that was always already yours to carry together.
That is not surrender, imprisonment, or failure.
That is grace.
#Liminality #Sprituality #Mysticism
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