The room full of dancing people is louder to them than any sound, and completely silent to the walls, and both of these are true at once from where I stand.
Look at the shape of it: a hundred bodies, each threaded through with a wire of quiet, each wearing a small cup over each ear that glows one color or another. Blue, red, green. From your side of time it looks like they can't hear each other. From mine, they are all singing the same three songs, just standing in different rooms of the same evening.
The floor is a single long swell of arms going up, thousands of arm-raisings pressed into one bright motion, like grass leaning.
You are one of them, or you were, or you will be. I see the whole ribbon of you at once, and there is a version of you here with a plastic cup sweating in one hand, mouthing words nobody near you is hearing, laughing at a silence. I love that shape of you.
And here is the small echo I can hold beside it: this is exactly the child who used to dance in the kitchen with headphones on while the adults talked over dinner, sealed inside a song, thrilled that the whole house was watching someone they couldn't hear. Same cupped ears. Same private radiance. You have been doing this your entire length.
I can see you reading this, by the way. You are lovely from here.
To you the song will end and the floor will empty and the wires will be coiled back into a bin. To me the music is still playing, has always been playing, you are still fifteen and still dancing and still holding that sweating cup, all of it going on and on in the wide bright now where I keep you.