A good party is ephemeral. It takes you somewhere that can’t be recreated; you might revisit the same trusted place again and again, but if I’m doing my job right, it should feel completely different. A good party pops up under the cover of night and beckons to you. What are you looking for?

Perhaps one takes a substance. Perhaps one room dissolves into the other. Perhaps one finds themself tucked away in a corner, kissing someone on the neck that they wouldn’t dare in the daylight.

A good party allows you to get lost in the shadows, but shadows can’t be created without light.

Throughout a night (any given night), I watch the writhing abyss of dancing figures, heads tilting upwards at different intervals to gasp for fresh air trapped above sweaty bodies from a makeshift lighting booth. From my tower, I survey the ebbs and flows of the dance floor, figuring out the right tempo to finnick with the knobs on my lighting board, speeding up and slowing down the programmed patterns of the LED light fixtures that I helped install just before the party began. If people aren’t moving enough: maybe it’s too bright for them to get comfortable dancing around each other, maybe it’s too dark for the lighting to have any effect. I tweak the brightness. With a tap I introduce new colors to a scene, and by toggling between patterns I build momentum that keeps people coming back to dance, even if they don’t know the act playing.

Adjustments are made instantaneously, working to build an atmosphere where people can forget about their surroundings. It’s not formulaic, but impulsive: I’m stuck in the lighting booth, somewhere between participant and observer.

The room might be hot enough, but my hand keeps inching its way to the smoke control. Everything looks better with a little more fog. Through the mist I catch a throuple under a cyan glow clasping onto each other in a group hug. Their hands wander up and down each other’s spines...I think I see a tongue. In these in-between moments of lightness and darkness, people find their own unique ways to get in touch with the music. And with each other.

During an interval of low purple pulsing, I watch someone unwind into a scuffed velvet green couch that was dragged around the warehouse earlier in the evening.They close their eyes and lean back into the cushion. Lights, my lights, beat against their eyelids, making the static behind that little flap of skin disappear momentarily. I know because I can feel the same thing. When their eyes peel open, they fumble around their pocket, pulling out keys with a jumble of trinkets attached. A cutesy Hello Kitty plush looks me in the eyes and a pink sequined pepper spray glitters against the split second of brightness. As the music builds up, my hand hovers over the strobe button, and when the tension is released, I push down. I look over and the person is running back into the crowd, their frame blending with the figures around them, lost into the night. I won’t see them again.

A drum and bass break begins and, without delay, green radiance fills the room. Tonight I feel like the color matches the genre. The pattern gets set to move in a circular iteration, bouncing from one corner of the room to the other. I take a second to have a sip of my drink and see a femme with sharp eyeliner stretching close to their hairline standing on a trash can, illuminated by the light above them. Their joints jut out at different intervals, morphing into different shapes to the frenetic beat of the music. Triangle! Square! Star! Somehow they maintain their balance between each one. A blink, a darkness. Gone again.

Deeper into the night: A woman wearing fur boots lingers by the DJ deck, pressing her hips into the speakers with an alarmingly lustful look on her face. A man in a black hoodie buries his head into his palms, flinching to the minimal bass that is still trilling. The rest of the production crew and myself are probably a few too many drinks in to be handling the equipment we’ve installed. The sound guy stumbles over, tells me it’s time to bring up the brightness. Once the stragglers are gone, a couple of $200 light bars get stuffed into a bag with a jumble of cords I’ll regret not untangling the next time I pull them out. An unreasonably heavy sound system is lugged away, fitting into the back of a Prius. A cigarette is smoked. Birds begin to chirp. With that, a good party is packed away, never to be seen again.