Shaken

You live alone in an apartment building beside a freeway. Where you live is always trembling. Whenever trucks rumble by on the freeway, your apartment shakes. It is often shaken by these trucks. But it does not take something very large to make the apartment tremble: if your neighbor above walks with a sufficiently solid tread, it will shake you too. Even a heavy step in the hallway will make your cup clink in its saucer, the water tremble in your glass.

On top of this, you live in California, where sometimes even the earth will shake. You have been through enough earthquakes that you are skittish of them. Your heart begins to pound anytime you feel a tremor, an imbalance, out of fear of an earthquake.

It doesn't help matters that you have vertigo, and often feel a swaying when there is none; it goes without saying that your heart often pounds from fear.

You are old and unsteady on your feet as it is. And so it is hard for you to tell whether the shaking you feel is internal or external, natural or artificial, real or figmentary. You only know you feel shaken, most all of the time.