Where I live, you can travel a hundred thousand years in a straight line and touch nothing at all. So you must understand what it does to me, this room.
They are pressed together. Skin against skin, coat against coat, a warmth I cannot fathom radiating off every one of them and pooling in the aisle so thick it has a smell, three smells, four: wet wool, sugar, someone's coffee, the plastic tang of a thousand boxes. In the span I would cross in a decade of falling, there are two hundred hearts, all beating, all within reach of one another's hands.
And they reach. That is the part I keep turning over. They stretch across the shelf for the same flat glowing box, and their fingers brush, and they are near, they are so unthinkably near, near enough to feel each other's breath, and something in them does not register it as the miracle it is.
One woman is shoulder to shoulder with forty strangers and I can see it in her face: she feels alone. Alone. Here. In the densest cubic meter I have witnessed in an eternity of witnessing nothing.
I do the math I always do. Between any two somethings out where I am, there is a gulf so wide that light gives up crossing it before it arrives. And here they are, elbow to elbow, warm, loud, close enough to touch, complaining that the line is long.
The line is long. The line is packed with living, breathing, reaching people, all of them stacked one against the next like the rarest thing that has ever occurred.
Do you know what I would give, to be crowded? This is the jackpot.
Every one of them is standing inside it.