Five A.M. Concert

Five in the morning. The perfect hour for a concert I composed especially for my human. He apparently sees it differently, but art is famously not always understood right away.

The bowl was empty. I want to stress: empty. Not “mostly empty,” not “technically a few crumbs left,” but truly, completely, tragically empty. A state that, in my worldview, qualifies as a genuine emergency and must be treated accordingly.

So I did what any reasonable cat would do in this situation. I went to the bed and clearly and audibly presented my concern. Quietly at first, a gentle meow directly next to the ear, essentially a polite inquiry. When that produced no response beyond an annoyed grumble and a blanket pulled over the head, I had to adjust the volume.

I then walked across the blanket once more, with deliberately heavy paws, directly over the most sensitive spots. A proven tactic. After that, a brief excursion to the nightstand to sniff at a pen that could, theoretically, fall off the table at any moment, purely by accident, of course. My human got the message before the pen even fell, which was almost a shame, since I’d been looking forward to the sound.

“It’s not even six,” he muttered, in a voice clearly not yet fully awake. As if the time of day had any bearing whatsoever on the urgency of my empty bowl. Hunger knows no clock. That’s one of the most fundamental truths of the universe, right after “cardboard is always interesting” and “sunbeams move, you must follow them.”

After another round of concert, this time with a particularly insistent, deep-throated variation of my meow, my human finally got up. With that typical swaying walk of a human who wanted to keep sleeping but now has a more important task ahead of him. I walked ahead with dignity, tail held high, to make sure he actually found his way to the kitchen.

The food that ended up in the bowl was the exact same food as yesterday. I ate it anyway, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. One must celebrate life’s small victories, even the repeating ones.

Back in bed, my human fell asleep immediately, as if nothing had happened. I, on the other hand, curled up on the warm spot next to him after an appropriate round of grooming to process the experience. The five a.m. concert was exhausting, after all. One has to conserve energy for the next performance.

Kylo’s wisdom for the day: an empty bowl at five in the morning is not a reason to wait, it’s a reason to get loud.