The door is the most important thing in the Universe. I know this door very well, all its cracks and scratches (a few of them mine from long ago), the places where the paint bubbled and was never fixed, the dark knot in the wood near the bottom that looks like an eye. I know its smells, its sounds, the way it sighs when it opens and clicks when it closes. Right now, it is closed. It has been closed for what I have calculated to be approximately four hundred years.

I sit in front of it. I think about what I know: somewhere on the other side of the door, she exists. She only nipped out to the shops, she said. Stupid shops that don’t allow dogs in.

I go to the window. The window is the second most important thing. It’s a portal channeling the outside world back at me.

A man walks by with a tiny dog. The dog is clad in a fluffy pink jumper despite a warm, sunny day. The dog sees my head peeking over the windowsill and goes ballistic with barking and pulling, taking its owner by surprise. I don’t know what to make of this. I stand very still and watch the man pick up his raging dog and hurry away. Then I watch the space where they were a second ago, just to be safe.

I return to the door and lie down in front of it. My chin touches the floor. I think, “I am the floor’s oldest friend”. The grandfather’s clock in the hallway ticks. A ray of sun slides across the floor, illuminating a million golden dust specks floating in the air. I sneeze.

Then the mail slot rattles and opens. I must have dozed off as I didn’t hear the mailman’s steps on the gravel. A brief rectangle of outside light, and the envelopes fall–a soft, definitive slap against the floor. When I was young, this used to be a crisis. An intrusion. A full emergency requiring my most serious voice. Now I lift my head and produce a single low sound from somewhere deep in my chest–a ghost of a bark, just to tick the box, as there are still rules. I lower my head again.

I move to the kitchen, my nails clicking loudly on the tiles. The kitchen sometimes produces things– crumbs on the floor near the toaster, a rogue piece of pasta that made it under the counter. But today I had already examined and licked all the usual spots clean. I checked twice, just to be sure. The only thing that’s left is the faint sacred trace of bacon from a morning ago. I stand in the kitchen for a while in case anything changes. It doesn’t. I take a drink of water. It tastes good and wet. .

I hear a car. It’s not hers–I know, because I can tell when it’s her car from four houses away, from the hum of the engine and the way she always slows down before driving onto the gravel in the driveway.

The afternoon light crosses the floor. I follow it and lie down in the patch of warmth near the couch. I close my eyes for a moment and think. I think about the couch. The couch is very close. I know that the couch has a particular corner–lower left, where the green fabric went soft and loose, waiting to be tugged on. Temptation. It would be so easy. One corner. I could have it done in under a minute. Nobody would even see it from the door. I consider this seriously for a while. Then I remember the chair.

It was a long time ago, when I was a puppy and did not yet understand the full weight of things. I had spent most of a Tuesday with the armchair’s left leg. I was not angry at the chair. I was simply curious about what it was made of, meditatively curious. And by the time I was finished, the chair only had three legs. I thought it was an improvement as the chair was now lower to the floor and easier to sit on, albeit a bit crooked. When she walked through the door and gave me a hug, I couldn’t wait to show her what I had done and tugged at the bottom of her skirt, but when she saw it, her whole face just fell. She just looked at the mutilated chair for a long moment with a face I had not seen before and have not forgotten since. She sighed and sat on the floor next to me and didn’t say anything, only scratched behind my right ear, and I pressed my whole body against hers and pushed my nose under her armpit. I haven’t seen that chair since.

I stare at the couch. I look away from the couch. I sneeze and go lie down on a cool tile near the back door, with my back to the couch, and I put my chin on my paws, and I try very, very hard to be very, very good and not to think about the couch at all.

But then the thought comes, the way bad thoughts always come–creeping in sideways, while you are thinking about something else entirely. One moment I am thinking about the water fountain in the hallway, the way it hums and cycles and keeps the water cool and moving, and the next moment I am thinking, “What if she doesn’t come back”?

I stand up. I don’t know why, but I stand up, like that would fix things.

The thought arranges itself clearly in my head: she has been gone for a long time. She has never been gone this long before, except for the other times, all of which turned out fine. But this time, it’s different, I can feel it. The house has a different quality of silence than usual, heavier, with more edges. What if something bad had happened to her?

What if someone had been mean to her? The world is full of mean people. I can smell them sometimes, at the park, people who move wrong, who have a sour smell of bad intentions. Why does she always go out without me?

I pace to the door and back. I walk to the window. I walk back to the door. I am not panicking. I am simply conducting a thorough patrol of the premises, trying to slow down the frantic beating of my heart.

I go to check the water fountain. It is still running. The water turns in its slow circle, clean and cold. This is good. This means there is still water. This means I am provided for. This is logic. This is airtight. I feel slightly better.

I go to check the food bowl. There is kibble in the bowl. I study it carefully. There is enough kibble for–I try to calculate–approximately half a small snack plus a small amount extra. I am glad and surprised I didn’t inhale it all at breakfast. I eat one piece of kibble to test it. It is the usual kibble. Everything is in order. I am not going to run out of food before she comes back because she is going to come back…because she always comes back…and the water fountain is running…and the kibble is here…and these are facts…this is evidence I am not going to spiral about this. I sigh.

I go back to the door and lie down in front of it with my nose pushed close to the gap at the bottom. The outside air comes through in faint puffs–exhaust, something sweet from the neighbor’s garden, the distant complicated smell of other dogs, other lives, other doors. I breathe it all in slowly, and I wait again.

Waiting is a skill. You have to let time flow through you rather than fight it. Just wait and trust.

In my dream, we are running. In my dreams, we are almost always running together, or I am chasing a ball, or I am close enough to touch her hand with my nose.

I wake up. The light has moved. Someone somewhere is mowing a lawn, and the smell of fuel and freshly cut grass comes through the crack at the bottom of the window, and I breathe it in slowly, with my whole chest.

And then I hear it–her car, exactly as I knew it would be, the very particular hum of it and a rustle of the tires on the gravel. And I am already at the door, already at my fullest and best and most true self, every part of me aimed at that single point of arrival. All the bad thoughts dissolve instantly and completely. She may never know they were there at all. She shouldn’t know I am such an alarmist, not at my age. Can’t make her worry about me.

My tail is saying something my body doesn’t have words for.

I hear the jangle on the other side, then a scratch of metal sliding into the keyhole, and the door sighs open. She is finally here. She smells like the world outside–coffee, wind, other people’s perfume–and also like herself, which is the best smell there is.

She says my name and calls me a good girl, and bends down, and I press my head into her hands, and I do not tell her about the spiral, or the kibble inventory, or the shameful thoughts I had about the couch corner. I do not tell her that I spent part of the afternoon genuinely convinced she had been swallowed by the city and was gone forever. I just lean into her hands and let her scratch behind my ears, and the tight knot inside my chest melts away, making it easy to breathe again.

She is here. She came back. Mum always comes back.