The line does not move, and no one is unhappy about this, which is the most extravagant thing I have ever seen.
They are folded against a wall that thumps with a heartbeat too big to belong to any of them, waiting for a small room, patient as stones, when a moment is the only thing anyone truly owns. And they are spending it here. Willingly. One is fixing her face in the glowing rectangle, adding paint she already wore, because, she tells the girl beside her, she will "redo it before we leave anyway."
Before we leave. So there is an after. There is a whole rest of the night she is confident enough to plan around, and she says it the way you'd mention the weather.
Two strangers meet at the front of the line and become instant, sworn, weeping friends. One presses her phone into the other's hand: "text me, we'll do this again." Again. She has done this before, all of it, the bass and the sweat and the queue, and she intends to do it once more, and this staggers me more than the music does.
To find something so good you'd repeat it. To find something so good you'd risk letting the first one blur.
A boy checks the time and groans that it's "only midnight." Only. As if the hours were coins in a pocket he keeps forgetting to count.
The door opens. The line breathes forward one body's width. Somewhere the light through the doorway shifts from violet to gold and back, and I see all of it, once, whole, which is the only way anything is ever seen.
You have so many of these nights. Stop measuring them.
Go in dancing.