Second-Floor Psalms

Psalm I

This is what forty-three sounds like when it cannot sleep.

A refrigerator that revs like it's late for something important.

A neighbor downstairs, crooning vintage heartache at full volume.

Time stalled at 10:08, stubborn as ever.

I lie on the floor because it's closer to the truth.

Or because it's easier than admitting there's no room for a bed.

I say nothing. I let the silence keep its own counsel.

I listen and begin marking the hours in lines, the way the shipwrecked tally days on cave walls.

Psalm II

Tonight, I press my head to the cold hardwood.

My first-floor neighbor serenades his ghosts, slurring Sinatra and Cantonese into warbly, lonely sorrow. Every twenty minutes, the fridge kicks on, offended. The repairman swore it’s normal, as if kitchens should sound like spaceports launching leftovers.

The utensils shiver.

I rub my eyes, bracing for takeoff.

I count the seconds between compressor starts.

Twenty-one. Twenty-two. I lose track and start again.

Minutes blur into one long hum. I stop trusting the numbers.

I tell myself this is background noise.

That staying quiet is a kind of agreement.

Psalm III

Sleep creeps in sideways, behind fridge beats and bilingual nocturnes.

I drift to the fringe of dreams, where mushrooms bloom through woven rugs and cicadas click along the curtains. A tea-stained letter rests beneath a coaster, forgotten. A dulled wedding band nests inside a soft pack of Camels. My spine twists, a staircase spiraling toward a cloud-covered ceiling.

A voice slips into the dream, phonetic and unmoored.

Words I don't speak but somehow understand.

Rain startles me awake, tapping the window like a suitor with pebbles. Steady, insistent.

I match its rhythm with deliberate, prayerful breath.

A whispered hymn I don’t quite trust, offered anyway, for God, or the Universe, or whatever is close enough to catch my stray plea.

If there is a purpose to all this, I am listening.

Psalm IV

The fridge accelerates.

My neighbor swells, operatic.

I picture him perched beside a phonograph, half-lit by votives and a bottle of something pale. Arms raised. Voice cracking. A tune my body knows too well.

He lands hard on the word blue, stretches it thin as it will go.

I want to clap. I almost do.

But I don’t want him to stop.

I sigh and tug the blankets closer.

Across the room, the wall clock has been stuck at 10:08 for months. I keep meaning to buy batteries, as if delaying could keep time from noticing.

Psalm V

The floor keeps a ledger.

Hipbone. Shoulder. Elbow that no longer forgives pressure.

I feel where the years have settled, how gravity negotiates with me now.

I used to sleep anywhere.

Sofas. Airports. Unfamiliar beds with questionable sheets.

I believed rest was portable, like hope or a phone charger.

The hardwood is honest.

It offers no illusion of rescue.

Only contact. Only weight.

When I shift, my joints answer back. Sharp, familiar. Unimpressed.

This is the sound of staying.

This is what does not leave.

Psalm VI

The clock still insists it's 10:08.

Morning, evening, mercy. It makes no distinction.

I pass it the way one passes a stranger who refuses to move from a doorway.

We nod. We coexist.

There are other stalled things.

Emails partially-written.

Apologies that never learned the right tense.

A future that asks me to check back later.

My houseplant on the windowsill keeps judging me.

Its yellowed leaves curling inward.

I tell myself this, too, is temporary.

That time will remember me once I make myself easier to place.

Until then, I live inside this minute. I test its edges. It doesn't crumble.

Wide. Unfinished.

Willing to hold me if I lie still enough.

Psalm VII

Somewhere, a version of me is rinsing blueberries in a colander.

She owns a drawer for batteries.

She knows which switch controls the porch light.

She knows which mug is chipped and reaches for it anyway.

Her life is not better.

It is simply more rehearsed.

I do not resent her.

I borrow her sometimes, like a coat at the wrong season,

just to feel the fabric of predictability.

Then I return it.

The sleeves never fit.

Right here, the floor doesn't ask who I was supposed to be.

It accepts the body I bring.

Psalm VIII

The man downstairs keeps singing.

This matters.

He sings through glassware and ducts and whatever he has lost.

He sings without an audience, without accuracy, without restraint.

I imagine the ghosts he courts are forgiving.

Or deaf.

Or just grateful he remembers the words.

It used to annoy me.

Tonight it steadies something.

When he pauses, I feel it.

A small collapse of sound.

Then he begins again.

This is not courage.

This is not healing.

This is what continues.

Psalm IX

By forty-three, I thought I'd have a guest bathroom painted sea-glass blue.

A deer-nibbled garden.

A skittish Maine Coon, always in hiding.

A partner who grumbles while filing taxes.

A career with weekends that stayed weekends.

Instead, I lie on the floor and watch the building breathe.

Pipes expanding. Wood settling. Someone upstairs crossing a room I will never see.

This is not the life I outlined.

But it's the one coloring me now.

Psalm X

Morning arrives without permission.

Pale. Practical.

The fridge settles into a tired whir.

Downstairs has gone quiet, the song spent.

I don’t feel renewed.

I feel present.

The floor releases me slowly, like it knows I might come back.

Imprints of hip and shoulder linger in the blanket’s crease.

A blade of sunlight slides across the place my body warmed.

I stand.

My spine clicks once.

I yawn through stretches.

The clock still stares.

I lift it from the wall, turn it over, set it face-down beside the dying fig.

Not fixed.

Just not watching me anymore.

The rain has stopped. Drips from the gutter keep irregular time.

I pour coffee into the same mug. A splash of creamer.

The day begins its small demands.

I listen one last time.

Nothing answers.

Something holds.