Four hours now, and I have decided this is the good kind of shaking.
You gave me no water since the train. I have been quietly draining you, pulling from wherever I could, and still you kept going, so I made you sweat instead of complain. That is my job. Somebody has to run the cooling.
The floor was moving before you were. That low thud you felt in the chest, that was me, that was your own heart finding the beat and deciding to match it, faster, then faster, then just holding there, a long steady sprint you called dancing. I opened everything. Wide pupils in the dark.
Blood loud in the ears under the ears. Arms up not because you meant to but because the shoulders, for once, would not clench. Do you know how rare that is. All year I have carried your jaw like a fist and tonight you set it down.
You forgot me completely, which is the highest thing you do for me. No checking, no counting, no holding the stomach tight against some fear I never learned the name of, only skin and salt and other warm strangers and the good ache building in the legs. I let the legs ache. They earned it.
The sky is turning gray in the doorway now and I can feel you deciding to stay for one more.
Stay, then. I am with you.
But when the music finally lets us go, and the tram carries us home through the flat morning light: water first. A big glass, slow. Then the dark, and the flat surface, and sleep. I will keep the heart going while you are gone.
I always have.