The thump is not in your ears. It is in the wall behind your sternum, four beats to the second, and you have decided this counts as your heartbeat for the next six hours. You will remember this differently than you think.
You are worried about your feet. Whether you look right. Whether the girl by the fog machine noticed you noticing her. None of that survives. What survives is this: the concrete floor sweating back the heat of five hundred strangers, the way the light stabbed and then withheld, and how at four in the morning a man you never learned the name of handed you water without a word and you drank it like it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done.
Your knees, love. Enjoy them. You do not know yet that they are on loan.
I want to tell you the music does not stop when the sun comes up, but the point was never the music. The point was that you were somewhere your phone could not follow, in a body that could still go all night, standing in the dark with people who asked nothing of you and gave you the whole room anyway.
You will spend years chasing the feeling and calling it other things. It was just this. A basement. A stranger's water. Bass instead of blood.
Stay for one more track. Then dance to it like your legs are yours forever.
They are, for tonight, and tonight is the part I kept.