All that thrown weight, that river of shoulders slamming and rebounding, and the one thing you kept out of it: your hands, checking your pocket for the phone, again, again. I saw. I collect the gestures you make without meaning to.
So tonight I will take the bass you felt in your sternum, the way it arrived before the sound, and I will make it a heartbeat, and the heartbeat will be a room, and you will live inside it. The strangers who caught you when you fell will have your mother's hands, all of them, forty arms, and you will not find this strange.
The circle that opened in the crowd and then closed again like water will keep opening, wider, until it is a field, and you will run across it with people whose names you never learned, and you will know them anyway.
That was the thing you wanted, wasn't it. Not the music. The being carried. You held so much of yourself back, kept your elbows in, kept your footing, kept checking. By two a.m. I will lose your feet entirely and you will not fall, you will only rise, passed hand to hand along the ceiling of the world, trusting it, finally, the way you would not let yourself trust it while awake.
I am not very good at endings. Around six, the light will get in under the door and I will start to come apart at the edges, the field, the forty arms, the heartbeat-room, all of it going thin as smoke. You will wake reaching for something. You will not remember what. That is all right.
I only ever had you for the one night, and I gave you back the falling with the fear taken out.