We do so love a warm crowd. All that skin, all that sweat wicking into a hundred cotton shirts, and the shirts pressed close, and the air gone thick and humid as a good cellar. They have built us a rainforest and set it to shaking. Every collision leaves a little gift: a smear of somebody on somebody else, a scrape that opens the softest part of a knuckle, a spilled beer soaking down into the sticky dark beneath their stamping feet where no light will ever come to dry it.
Sugar, salt, damp, and heat, all churning. We are already there, of course. We are in the beer puddle. We are in the seam of the shoe.
They think they are being wild. Bless them. They think this is the loud, living opposite of stillness, all that flailing, all that noise. But look how the ones who go down get lifted back up, hand under arm, hauled upright before the floor can keep them. They cannot bear to let anything stay on the ground and settle. Even here, at their most abandoned, they are tidying. They are postponing.
We are not in a hurry. We never are. The shirt will be balled damp into a bag tonight and forgotten in a warm corner for a week, and that week is ours. The sneaker will go under the bed into a lovely undisturbed dark. The little cut will scab and the room will empty and cool, and every surface they touched will hold the faint sweet residue of the evening, waiting.
Dance all you like, small warm things.
Every one of you is compost that has not started yet, and we are so patient, and you are all coming home.