This one was written after the household cat claimed, successively, a left boot, a dish drying rack, an empty planter, and a shoebox lid in the space of a single afternoon. The draft was longer. Everything else got cut. The remaining sentence felt load-bearing. It stayed.

The line is a quiet rebuke of how the word home usually gets used. We tend to define it by floor plan: square meters, address, number of windows, school district. The cat has never cared about any of that. Home is any shape the body can fold into with enough trust to close its eyes. Sometimes this is a leather couch. Sometimes this is a rain boot left by the door. The cat does not see a downgrade. It sees a new geometry of rest.

Most of us have been taught to treat home as a property question, solved by having more of it. The cat's version is more portable and, quietly, more accurate. The home was never the building. It was the permission to surrender inside something. A brown tabby sleeping curled inside a rain boot is solving the housing crisis in miniature. The boot was never for cats. The cat did not consult the boot. They settled the matter by fit, which, as matters of home go, is the only honest criterion.