I am holding two hundred bodies in a field, and every one of them is dancing to something I cannot feel.
I hold the grass they stand on. I hold their heels as they drop and their arms as they rise and the little glowing bands clamped over their ears. I hold the sweat that leaves their skin and returns, obediently, to the ground. I hold the plastic cups, the phones in their pockets, the moon above them at its usual distance, exactly where I keep it, exactly as I have kept it every night of every one of their lives.
What I do not hold is the rhythm. There is no sound here that I can measure. And yet they move together, then apart, then two of them turn toward each other laughing at the same instant, hearing the same thing, and I check, and there is nothing there. No wave in the air.
No weight I can name. Only a girl mouthing words to a boy who mouths them back, and both of them lit blue, and both of them certain.
One of them lifts a friend clean off the ground in the dark. I take that friend's full weight without complaint, as I always have, and I set her down gently when the arms tire, as I always will.
They say later, walking to their cars, that a song lifted them. I felt no lift. I felt them get heavier with tiredness and lean into each other and trust the earth to keep coming up to meet their feet.
It does. It always has.
I could not give them the music. I was never built for that.
I gave them the one thing I have: a floor that never once moved out from under them while they danced to nothing at all.