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Order a punching bag online — the air isn't enough anymore. Then skip the workout tonight. My body needs rest too. Sell my couch as well to make room for the punching bag. I sleep on the floor anyways

Lena picks up her phone from the carpet and opens the browser. The search takes thirty seconds — "heavy bag punching bag free standing" — and the results fill the screen with options she does not have the patience to evaluate. She picks the heaviest one, a ninety-pound freestanding bag with a base you fill with water or sand, and pays for expedited shipping and does not read the reviews. The air has been a good teacher. The air has taught her form and footwork and the geometry of combinations. But her knuckles have been closing on nothing for two weeks and the nothing is not enough anymore. She needs something that hits back.

She puts the phone down and her body does not move toward the workout. This is not a decision she recognizes as a decision. She sits on the floor with her back against the couch and her legs stretched out and her belly resting heavy on her thighs and the sweat from the day drying on her skin, and the routine does not call to her. The push-ups do not call. The squats do not call. The boxing does not call. Her muscles are sore in the deep-tissue way that means they have been asked to do something for twelve consecutive days without rest and they have reached the end of what recovery-without-pause can provide. She sits and the sitting feels correct and the warmth does not protest. It pulses, low and slow, and the pulse says nothing. It does not say more. It says rest.

The couch sells the way the bed sold — photographed, posted on the building message board, purchased by someone on a lower floor for a hundred and fifty dollars. A woman and her boyfriend come to collect it Wednesday evening and Lena stands in the door naked until she remembers she is naked and pulls on the shorts and sports bra and the two of them carry the couch out and do not look at the carpet, at the indentation, at the delivery containers, at the smell. They leave and Lena closes the door and the living room is larger than it has ever been. The room is becoming a rectangle of bare floor with a water bottle and a phone and a yellow legal pad in one corner and a growing pile of delivery containers against the far wall. The space where the couch was is the space where the punching bag will go. She can see it already.

She sleeps early. The floor receives her at nine-thirty, which is three hours earlier than usual, and her body folds into the carpet with a gratitude that is almost vocal — the muscles unknotting, the spine lengthening, the belly spreading soft and warm across her lap as she lies on her side. The apartment is quiet. No punches. No feet on the carpet. No sound except her breathing and the hum of the fridge, which is empty again and will stay empty because the food comes from outside now and the fridge is a cabinet she does not open. She sleeps deeply and without dreaming and the warmth stays low and steady through the night, a pilot light, waiting for the morning when the routine will start again and the numbers will go up and the bag will be on its way.