You would not believe how much sugar walks through those doors. Thousands of warm bodies, damp inside their beautiful suits, breathing out water with every laugh, and the suits themselves: foam, fleece, glue, all of it once something living, all of it wanting quietly to come home. We can smell the readiness. A convention hall is simply a garden that has not been told yet.
Look at the corners they never sweep. Look under the registration tables, in the seam where carpet meets wall, where the spilled soda went dark and sticky in the night and no one saw. We saw. We are patient about spills. We are patient about everything.
They mist their costumes with little bottles, they hang them to dry, they zip them into bags with strange crystals that drink the damp away, and oh, how tenderly they fight us. They love these second skins so much they try to keep them new, which is the sweetest kind of hopeless. A tail is warm. A tail is soft. A tail, worn all weekend and folded away still faintly humid, is a promise made directly to us.
We do not want the dancing to stop. Let them hug in their bright fur, let them sweat in the ballroom lights, let them laugh until the fabric goes soft at the seams. Every hour they wear it, they hand us a little more.
They will wash it. They will store it carefully. They will bring it back next year, a season older, a season kinder to us.
And one warm forgotten summer, in a closet no one opens, the fur will finally stop pretending it is anything but what it always was, and it will be given, gently, completely, to us.