When we last checked in, the scoreboard read: Mumma — 1 lunchtime nap. V1 — 1 successful infiltration. V2 — 0, and a great deal of feelings about it. Tiniest Girl — 1 brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempt while Mumma was in residence.
We assumed V1 had won.
We were wrong.
TG — Tiny Girl, our smallest cat, the one we had written off as a brave-but-sensible non-contender — has claimed the Pusheen bed. Not temporarily. Not opportunistically. Permanently, with the quiet and absolute conviction of someone who has decided, and cannot be undecided.
She is simply in it, every time you look. She is in it with a persistence that borders on the philosophical. She has outlasted everyone. She attempted it when Mumma was there, found the conditions unsatisfactory, retreated, regrouped, and came back when the timing was right. What looked like a retreat was, apparently, a strategic withdrawal.
V2 sits outside it. Waiting. She has not given up. She is a gatekeeper without a gate, a bouncer who has been comprehensively removed from their own venue, a cat who has coveted this bed since the moment it arrived and has been thwarted at every turn — by her own size, by her sister, by Mumma, and now, finally and most completely, by the tiniest cat in the house.
It turns out that what matters is not size, or seniority, or four days of pointed sulking.
It’s perseverance.
TG has it. V2 does not.
The Pusheen bed has found its person. She is very small and she has absolutely earned it.
thestationhousenotebook 