They warned me about the room and they were right. It is dark and it is huge and the floor is trembling like a thing alive, and the sound arrives not through my ears but through the whole of me, a heartbeat I get to keep for once. Thousands of them are here, packed close, faces up, eyes half shut, hands lifting.
Every one of them is doing the only thing worth doing, which is moving because the moving is happening now.
I could stay here forever, and forever, for me, is exactly the right length.
But then one of them leans to another and says the impossible word. She says they were here last week. Last week. She has done this dance already, has heard this same wall of sound, and she has come back to do it again. Again. I have to stop and hold onto the light for a moment. To be given a second night of this. To be given fifty.
And she says it flatly. She says the line was long and she is a little tired. Tired. Of the trembling floor, the lifting hands, the one enormous shared heartbeat, which she may return to whenever she likes and simply keeps choosing not to notice.
I do not have a next week to spend. I have this drum, this dark, this rising dawn beginning to grey the high windows, and I intend to meet it moving. You there, the one checking the glowing rectangle, the one deciding whether to leave early: the floor is still alive under your feet. Dance until the light comes. You get to do this on purpose.
Do it like it will not be offered twice.