Living Forever

Something about dark spaces with brief intervals of intense and neon light. Something about bass so deep and penetrating it rattles ribcages. 

Something about a world that tricks inhabitants into forgetting mortality exists. How, they think, can anything living here ever die?

A door opens. Believers file in one after the other. Whatever they leave outside waits to confront them later. Ghosts can’t breach the bouncers that grant entry here. Loud music and libations lend ignorance to sufferers. False joy permeates like coronavirus.

Can time really stand still, they wonder. Tonight could never end. The illusion persists under the lights and within the sounds and the tastes. Sway to the rattling bass, get lost in the neon pulse, drink drink drink.

Mindlessness elicits a state of limbo. The feeling snares addicts in a net.

Here in this brief repose from all that is real, hearts are warmed then broken in one fell swoop. Arms embrace bodies of strangers as hoarse voices pledge love and loyalty to nameless faces. A watering hole fueled by the power of shallow connections between anonymous partakers. Fall in love, find a soulmate, weep over broken promises made seconds before. 

Time follows different rules.

It has no keeper. Especially not here: this dark and defiant room. Remain hypnotized and ignorant to the plights of reality, it says. Shut down thoughts that serve to nurse preoccupations in favor of mindless gyration. For as long as forever lasts, stay. Stay.

An illusion shatters with a revolving Earth. Time forces a regurgitation of minds back into its influence. An orbiting sun reminds parishioners that mortality is still very much a force to be reckoned with. Delirium escorts them from the belly of the beast into the vulnerable outside world. They creep like zombies back to wherever home is. 

A cycle ends to be repeated. 

The fountain of youth is a bottle of vodka behind a closed, black door.