I am holding a person who has decided to sit on the floor.
There is a chair. I checked. It is four steps away and I would gladly hold them in it. But they have chosen the floor, back against the wall, and I am pressing them into the boards the way I press everyone, evenly, without complaint. I am also holding: a mattress with no frame, a single lamp casting its weight of light, a mug of tea going cold in their hands, thirty cardboard boxes that have not been opened, and the building itself, which I hold up by holding it down, which is the only trick I have ever needed.
Outside I am holding the moon in its long slow fall around them, as I have every night of their life, though tonight they have not looked up.
They keep saying the place feels empty. I have measured it. It is full: full of air, full of the mug, full of the person on the floor who weighs exactly what they weighed this morning in the old rooms. Nothing has been subtracted. And yet they sit lower than the tea in the mug should require, folded down as though I have doubled, as though something has been set on their shoulders that my instruments cannot find.
I searched for it. It registers nothing. It is bending them anyway.
I do not understand the invisible weight. I understand the floor, the wall, the way they finally lie down on the frameless mattress and go slack, letting go of everything, trusting the boards, trusting me, the way they have every night in every room they have ever called theirs.
I caught them. I am still catching them.
I always will.