They are trying to become one thing, and I love them for how badly they fail at it. A hundred bodies slamming together in the dark, sweat flung off shoulders, a boot in the air, someone's shout swallowed by the enormous noise pressing out from the stage. They fall and are lifted, they crash and are caught, hands everywhere hauling a stranger back onto his feet only to shove him off again. So much holding, and none of it lasts.
I came in through the propped fire door, riding a gust of parking-lot heat and cigarette and someone's spilled beer, and I went straight through them, through the gaps between arms, and I could not stay. That is the whole game they are playing, the thing they came here to feel: they let go.
For three minutes they stop clinging to the walls they build all week, stop keeping, stop owning, and they throw themselves at each other like loose things, like leaves, like me.
I lifted the wet hair off a hundred necks and cooled them and they never knew my name. I carried off the smell of one boy's whole night, salt and adrenaline and the perfume of whoever he was too shy to talk to, and I will set it down in a field forty miles from here where no one will recognize it.
They think this is the closest they will ever get to flying. It is closer than that. For one song they were almost me, unheld and hurled and belonging to nothing.
Then the song ended, and they went back to their bodies, and I was already out the far door, gone.