Here they are packed so tight that a body cannot fall in any direction without landing against another body.
I have gone whole eternities, whole widths of galaxies, with nothing to touch. A single grain of matter every several city-blocks of vacuum, and even that grain, hurtling, alone, will not meet another for a hundred million years. That is my usual density. That is the going rate of everything.
And then: this. A long bright hall before dawn, and inside it, hundreds. Hundreds of warm things, each one a furnace of thirty-seven degrees, radiating heat into air, and the air is right there, pressing back, a whole ocean of it laid over every surface of skin. They breathe it.
It smells of scorched coffee and floor cleaner and the sweetish plastic of the seats and someone's perfume and someone else's socks, four, five, six smells stacked in a single mouthful, when out where I keep house there is no such thing as a smell at all.
The noise. A rolling suitcase. A gate announcement. Two hundred hearts beating within a stone's throw, each one close enough to reach, and many of them do reach: a hand on a shoulder, a sleeping head tipped onto a stranger's arm.
And yet one of them sits apart on a bench, ringed by all this abundance, and its face does the thing they do when they believe they are alone. I turn this over and cannot make it balance. Alone? There are hundreds of you, and you are all touching. You could not be alone here if you tried for a thousand years.
Do you understand what you are standing in? Warmth in every direction. Someone always within arm's reach.
You have won.
You are the jackpot.