Between the last star I passed and the next one lies a gap so wide that light gives up counting. Nothing crosses it. Nothing warms it. Then, tonight, I found this.
A cellar under the ground, and inside it: everything, all at once, in one place.
The heat first. Bodies giving off warmth so freely, so wastefully, hundreds of small furnaces standing so close their skins nearly touch, and none of them dying of the cold. I have never held a single degree of warmth. Here they throw it away by the roomful.
The sound is inside the air, and the air is inside their chests. A pulse, low and enormous, and it moves through every one of them at once, so their hearts are hammering in the same rhythm at the same second within arm's reach of each other. In my whole expanse, two heartbeats have never once happened close enough to hear.
The smells are stacked six deep: sweat, smoke, someone's cheap perfume, spilled beer gone warm, the concrete itself. Three hundred living things breathing the same borrowed air, passing it mouth to mouth without meaning to. Sharing.
And in the middle of it, near the wall, one of them stands very still. It is not moving with the others. It has that look I have seen and never understood, the look that means alone. Alone. Here. Where you could reach out in any direction and land on something warm and beating and here.
I have done the math a trillion times. Between me and my nearest anything: four years of light, screaming, in a straight line, arriving at nothing.
They think this is Tuesday. They think this is a place you leave at dawn.
From out here, I would call it the whole prize.