We hopped from bare toe to bare toe and giggled at the haptic energy of the moment, and we didn’t look at our phones and wait for the next alert to shock us back to frenetic nightmare, but instead we stayed awake.

And with enough rambling bounds and spins and skips we began to sweat, and the coolness on the back of my neck felt like summer, but the kind when you can go outside and lay in the grass and spread your arms wide and not care if your fingers happen to graze another hand.

Because it was the first time we had really moved our bodies in days, it felt like freedom.

Let me live in that feeling now, the imagined sun, the hazy heat of afternoon and cold, soft grass tickling between my toes, which are, after all, quite easy to tickle.

I’ll think now to those series of first kisses, each only scary because it was the first and you are never too old to be nervous with new lips.

How necessary it is to be touched and to feel the texture of the world lilt along your skin.

But tonight, at least, we are dancing so large that our calves begin to ache and we almost forget that we are paused, waiting for permission to find people who can hold us. Tonight we bruise our toes from the percussion, and it is worth it all the way down to our bones.