Between the last star I remember and the next one is a distance I will not bother to name, because you would need every zero you own and then more zeros than there are things to count. Nothing crosses it. Nothing is warm out here. Nothing waits.
So consider what I have found in this small dark room.
A machine, humming, holding numbers made of red light. Beside it, a body: warm, so warm, radiating heat into the air the way I have never held anything. The air itself presses down on the skin, thick with three smells at once, the sour breath and the cotton and the faint salt of a person who has been dreaming.
And within reach, within a single arm's reach, another warm body, breathing in a different rhythm. Two hearts. In one room. Close enough to touch. I have swept past whole galaxies and never once been that close to a single beating thing.
Then the machine cries out, and the warm body groans, and its hand comes down flat to silence the light. It curls tighter. It pulls the fabric over its face. It seems to wish itself smaller, further, somewhere with fewer things pressing in.
I do not understand this. It has a second warm body an arm's length away and a whole ceiling holding the sky out. It is drowning in nearness. If I had one degree of that heat, one lungful of that crowded air, I would never once close my eyes on it.
The red numbers change. The room stirs. Two hearts, still beating, still that close.
From where I have been, this is the winning number.