It's sweaty and thick, the air that barely existed between the mass of hobbling bodies. Skin against skin everywhere, they were touching before they talked or they never talked at all.

The lights were so bright that they blinded you every few seconds, spinning around the room to eventually have the room spinning around you. The floor shook and who knew if it was because there was an earthquake coming or if the music was just too loud? Your mind was too fogged up by the alcohol to let you differentiate between a glass wall and thin air, let alone vibrations beneath your unsteady footing.

There was heavy breathing coming from everywhere and you felt their hot and heavy breaths skim your neck and features, their hazy, drunken stare gazing no deeper than the mask between them and you. It was no different to staring at portraits in a gallery. There was nothing but a solid, blank canvas behind their thick layers of paint – there were no people here, only skins and tatters of broken hearts and souls, gathering at a meaningless celebration to appease their falling pieces.

Blue faces, turning red then green then yellow. They were all faces of the same few colours. Faces that nobody knew and nobody ever would, faces that only existed in the middle of the night between these four walls and never anywhere else. They belonged to somebody – each face – but nobody knew which belonged to who. There was nobody to see and figure out. There were no witnesses to their crimes and rebellions against the rules that barred each of their small worlds.

Unsure hands would grasp onto cups they thought were mugs, drowning themselves in a love they couldn't find in people or possessions.

These were their lives – slow-moving in an ocean of fast and loud music, always acquainted but never to be befriended, seen once to never be seen again. These were the lives of the truly broken-hearted.