Where I come from, a photon can travel four years and touch nothing. Here, in this small square of warmth, a human lies down and holds a lit stone six inches from its own face, and the two of them are almost touching. Do you understand what I am telling you. Six inches. I have stretched across distances that would take that lightless stone a hundred lifetimes to cross, and I never once brushed against anything at all.
The room is impossibly full. There is the heat coming off the human's chest, slow and steady, a little furnace. There is breath, going out warm and coming back cool. There is the faint smell of the blanket, and under it the smell of the human itself, and under that something sweet gone slightly sour on a plate by the bed.
Three smells. Stacked. In the same tiny pocket of air. I have gone eternities smelling nothing, because smell requires things to be near each other, and out here nothing is ever near anything.
And the stone in its hands is crowded too, packed with faces, hundreds of them, other warm humans close enough to speak. The human scrolls through all of them. Its thumb moves and moves. Its heart, I notice, beats faster, the way a small animal's does when it is afraid, though nothing here is cold and nothing here is far.
I have listened to this human think, quietly, that it is alone.
I do the math again, to be sure. Down the hall: another heartbeat, warm, twenty feet away. That is closer than I have ever been to anything.
From where I lie, spread thin across the dark, this is the fullest place in all of it. This is the jackpot.
This is everything, arriving all at once.