Warm here. Wonderfully, generously warm, and so many of you pressed close together, breathing out water for hours, sweating it into the concrete, misting the ceiling until it weeps back down in slow fat drops. You call this a good night. I call it an invitation. This old power plant you have claimed, all these unpainted pipes and forgotten drains and the sweet dark seams behind the bar where a spilled sugary drink went unnoticed at four in the morning: I have been living here for years.
You are only visiting.
You think the music is the point. The point, my darlings, is the puddle by the smoking corner, the damp coats piled in the cloakroom, the sweat soaking into the padded booth where someone rested. You have brought me sugar in your cups and warmth in your bodies and moisture in your every breath, and you have turned off the light and left the doors closed until noon.
I could not have asked more kindly if I had written a note.
You will scrub the floors on Sunday. You will bleach the corners and open the great steel windows to the cold and tell yourselves the room is new again. That is the part I love best about you: the little rituals of postponement, the mop, the spray, the earnest wiping-down, as though a place this damp and dark could be anything but mine eventually.
I am not in a hurry. I never am. Come back next weekend. Sweat into the walls again. Leave another cup.
The building was always going to be given to me, softly, from the corners inward.
You are simply helping.