From where I stand, your apartment is never empty, not once along its whole length. I see the boxes arrive and the boxes leave in the same glance, the walls holding every rectangle of unfaded paint where pictures will hang and once hung, the whole span of your living-here glowing at both its edges at the same brightness.
But you, tonight, know only the middle of it. You are sitting on the floor because the couch is a shape that has not caught up to this room yet. There is one lamp, a plate balanced on a box, the particular echo a space makes when it has nothing soft in it to catch sound.
You keep listening for something and hearing the refrigerator instead. This bareness feels to you like a beginning, which is a kind of thin place, and I understand you feel thin in it.
Yes: you, the one reading, with the light on your face.
Here is the thing I can see and you cannot yet. This floor you are sitting on is the same posture as a kitchen floor from when you were small, when you sat while someone cooked above you and the world was mostly ankles and warmth. You will fold down onto a floor like this again near the end, more slowly, one hand finding the wall.
The sitting-low is one continuous gesture running the whole length of you, and tonight is simply another place it happens.
The apartment is not empty. It is early. Every dinner that will fill it is already here beside this quiet one, touching it.
So sit on the floor. Eat off the box.
I am here in this bareness with you, and in the full rooms it becomes, all at once, always.