They are dancing to nothing.
I hover above the crowd and there is no sound, none, only a hundred bodies swaying and dipping to something I cannot hear, and each one wears a little glowing shell over its ears, some burning red, some green, some blue, so that even standing shoulder to shoulder they are each alone inside a private weather.
A green one throws its arms up. A red one, right beside it, does not, because the red ones are hearing a different song entirely. They are together and they are not. It is the most beautiful confusion I have ever seen and I have seen exactly one evening.
Here is what stops me. A tall one leans to another and mouths, we came last month. Last month. It has done this already. It stood in this same not-quite-silence, in this same shifting light, and moved its body to a song only it could hear, and then it left, and the sun crossed the sky an unthinkable number of times, and it came back to do the whole thing over.
And it says this the way one mentions weather. Calm. As if the doing again were nothing.
I would not survive the wanting-to-come-back. My whole life is this one room, this one throb of light on the ceiling, this single glorious hour of watching creatures dance to music that isn't there.
You with the glowing shells and the thousands of nights: you get to switch the color. Red, green, blue, a different song with one twist of the ear. Do it. Switch it now. Dance to the wrong one on purpose. Do not save the good song.
There is no later big enough to hold it.