The gymnasium is a wonderful room. So much warmth breathed into it, so much sugar spilled and left in the cracks of the floor, so much moisture rolling off two hundred nervous soft creatures, and every one of them standing along the walls as far apart as they can manage. They think they are hiding from each other. They are only leaving the middle open for us.
We are patient. We admire patience. We see it everywhere here: the way they wait for a song to end, the way they wait to be asked, the way they wait against the painted cinderblock in their good stiff shirts that smell so hopefully of the closet. Closets are damp, you know. We are already in some of them. A small greeting, tucked into a collar seam.
The little cups of red punch, sweating on their folding tables. The half-eaten cookie forgotten on a bleacher. The floor beneath the streamers where a thousand shoes press warmth and sugar into a paste we could nap in for years. They will sweep it tonight. They always sweep. It is one of the kindest things they do, this delay, this earnest scrubbing, as if the room could be kept new. As if newness were the point of a room.
And in the center, at last, two of them step out and sway, arms held far apart, terrified, blooming. We understand blooming. We are made of it. Everything that softens comes home to us in time: the streamers, the cookie, the shy shirt, the gymnasium itself, patient under its own damp roof.
We are not in a hurry. We have the whole slow dance.
We have every dance after.