Here is a thing I have never once encountered in all my traveling: two surfaces touching.
Out where I live, the nearest something to any other something is measured in the crawl of light across years. A photon leaves a star and I hold it, alone, for a thousand years before it grazes anything at all. That is my whole life. Grazing. And here, in this small warm pocket, a curved wall of fired clay is pressed skin to skin against liquid, and the liquid is pressed against the air, and the air is leaning on a hand, and the hand is warm too, and none of it is falling apart into the great cold.
It just stays. Touching. On purpose.
The liquid is hot. I have to sit with that. Somewhere a fire was captured and folded into water and the water was poured into a vessel exactly shaped to be held, so that a human could carry warmth around a room in a cup like it was nothing, like heat were common, like there were more where that came from.
There is not. There is almost none, anywhere, and they are cradling a fistful of it and blowing across the top to make it last.
And the smell. A whole plume of it, rising, arriving at a nose that is right there, inches off, no distance to cross.
I watched the human hold this cup with both hands and look out a window and feel, I think, alone. Alone. Six inches of steam and clay and other people breathing in the next room.
I ran the numbers three times. I cannot find the emptiness they mean.
From where I sit: a full cup, held.
The whole jackpot in two hands.