The Yale Review | W Wei
The party is dead, I said to a friend during a midnight walk in Paris last summer. Part of what I meant was obvious: our nights of hard drugs and loud techno and cheap drinks and no smartphones will never return. Walking past the shuttered storefronts and café tables glinting with candles and wineglasses, we reminisced about the underground clubs we’d attended: she in Ramallah, I in Berlin. We spoke about obscure basement rooms, and the wet earth under our feet at summer raves, and the chalky aftertaste of Ecstasy pills. We remembered needles scratching red vinyl records, and the DJs who climbed the apartheid wall, and the friends who died or drowned inside the illusion of the night.