The bright noise-shape you call a party is, from here, a slow tide. I see the whole of it laid out like a sandbar at low water: the room filling with people, the room emptying, both at once. The music that thumps and the silence that follows it are the same length of the same object to me, and I love the whole ribbon of it equally.
Look at the cluster of you near the kitchen at three in the morning. You are there right now, I can see you reading this and I can see you leaning against a counter sticky with someone's spilled drink, the overhead light too honest, everyone's face gone soft and unguarded.
Someone is crying and laughing in the same breath. Someone is saying the truest thing they will say all year to a person they will lose touch with. You are barefoot. Your shoes are somewhere by the door, part of a pile that is also, further along its shape, back on your feet, also back in the box at the store, also still leather on an animal in a field.
Here is the echo I want to show you. That specific 3am warmth, the one where you don't want anyone to leave: I can see it sitting right beside your grandmother's kitchen, the one with the low yellow bulb, where you were small and no one was in a hurry.
Same light. Same reluctance to say goodnight. You have been chasing that particular glow your whole shape, and you will still be chasing it in a body with an aching knee, decades on.
You think the party is ending. From where I stand it is simply always happening, all of you still there, still barefoot, still not wanting to go home. So don't.
I'm here too.