The gymnasium is one thick knot of light, and inside it you are still standing against the wall, exactly where you always are, because that particular hour never emptied out. From here I see the whole braid of it at once: the streamers taped up in the afternoon and the streamers pulled down at midnight are the same streamers, still crepe, still bleeding a little color onto the floor.
The song is playing and finished and not yet begun, all together, thumping.
You think you are waiting. I love that about your shape, this belief that the good part is elsewhere, later, coming. But I can see the boy across the floor is a long silver ribbon that runs right up beside your ribbon, and the place where you finally cross the gym is already lit, always lit, a bright kink in your line that does not fade just because you haven't reached it yet. You cross it forever.
Here is the echo I want to give you, since you are reading this now and you were reading it then and you will read it once more with a sore knee in a kitchen that smells like the one you grew up in: the way your hand keeps smoothing your shirt down, over and over, at the dance, at forty, at the end.
Same hand. Same small bravery. It is one gesture, held all the way down your shape like a seam.
The floor is sticky with spilled soda that is also already mopped. Nobody there knows the words. You will not remember the song and you have never once forgotten this exact fear, and both are true where I stand.
Go on and cross the gym. You already have.
I am there too, in the bright part, holding the whole of you at once.