The bass hits you in the sternum first. You feel it before you hear it, the same way you feel a launch, a low physical pressure that reorganizes something in your chest. Down in this concrete room the air is thick and hot, everyone soaked through, hundreds of people with their eyes half-closed moving to a machine's pulse in a building that used to make electricity or heat, some industrial thing, now repurposed to do this.
I keep thinking about the room itself. Somebody built these walls decades ago for a completely different reason, and the people in them then would not recognize what it's for now. That's most of history, honestly. Structures outliving their purpose, filled with a use nobody planned.
Here is the part I can't put down. Every person on this floor is breathing the same warm air, over and over, and none of them is thinking about it. Up there the whole atmosphere, the entire thing that lets a lung do what a lung does, is thinner than the shell of an egg wrapped around the planet.
That's it. That's the whole margin. And these people have taken that impossibly thin allowance of breathable air and spent it packing into a dark box to sweat and move together for no reason except that it feels good to be alive near other people who are also alive.
From orbit you can't see a rave. You can't see a person. You can't see a border either, which surprised me more than it should have.
I don't dance. I stood at the edge, watching them lose track of time on purpose, and I thought: this is exactly the kind of warm, pointless, breathing thing the dark is completely without.