Twelve women in a line that bends around the hand dryer, and not one of them is impatient with the wait. That's the part that stopped me.
The floor is wet. Someone's heel is broken and she's holding it like a small dead bird. The music comes through the wall as pressure, not sound, so everyone talks louder than they need to. A stranger fixes another stranger's eyeliner with a thumb, both of them squinting under a light designed to make everyone look worse.
I keep track of things by instinct now. I count the air. There's a thin band of breathable atmosphere wrapped around the planet, and if you shrank the Earth to the size of an apple, that band would be thinner than the skin. Everything any human has ever done happens inside that skin. This queue. This girl crying about a text, and the four others deciding, without a meeting, that they will stand with her until she stops.
From orbit you can't see borders. You can't see buildings. You can't see the difference between a country at war and one asleep. You certainly can't see a nightclub bathroom, or the girl handing over her last stick of gum, or the whole line moving up one step in unison like something breathing.
I used to think the view up there was the big thing and this was the small thing.
I had it backwards. The big thing is the black, and there's an unimaginable amount of it. This is the rare thing. Twelve warm people, packed into a tiled room, being briefly and pointlessly kind to each other, in the only sliver of the universe where that has ever once occurred.
Hold your friend's broken shoe.
There is nowhere else to put it.