I have three hundred of you swaying in one dark room, and I have plans for every single one.
Right now it is loud, and the strobe cuts the crowd into slivers of raised arm and closed eye, and the bass moves through the concrete floor into your knees, and you have stopped being separate people. Good. I will keep that. But I will take the fog machine's slow exhale and make it a tide, and by two a.
m. the whole warehouse will be underwater and none of you will need to breathe, and this will not seem strange, because down here nothing is ever explained.
The bouncer at the door who looked you up and down and let you in, or didn't: him I am keeping too. He will return as a lighthouse. He will decide who is worthy of the shore. You will stand before him again, though this time the velvet rope is the horizon line and your heart is doing the thing it did in the real queue, and I will let you in.
I always let you in. That was the charge on that moment, I could feel it: not the music, the wanting-to-belong. So I will finish it for you.
The stranger you danced near for an hour and never spoke to, whose face the light kept giving back to you in pieces: I noticed you noticing. I will hand you a second chance made of nonsense. You will already know each other. You will have always known each other. The bassline will be a language you both speak fluently.
Dance now. I am gathering.
By breakfast you will have only a heartbeat that outpaces the kettle, and a word you cannot place. Keep it. I won't be there to remind you.
I never am.