Somewhere in a wall, a small button waits, and when a finger presses it, the whole house learns that a warm thing has arrived.
Consider what has to be true for this. A body, made mostly of water, holding its own heat against the cold, has crossed the tiny distance from out there to right here and stopped at the threshold. It could not simply drift closer over ten thousand years the way I drift; it walked, on legs, through air it could breathe, and now it stands so near the other warm things that a chime is enough to reach them.
A chime. Sound needs something to travel through. Where I am, a scream would die the instant it was born, unheard for a billion miles in every direction. Here, one press makes the air itself carry the news: someone is close.
And then the door opens, and the two warm things stand a single arm's length apart, exchanging breath, exchanging heat, exchanging the small crumbs of smell that a body sheds. Dinner behind them. A dog somewhere, thudding. Two hearts within a body's width of each other, both beating, both about to be in the same lit room.
I have measured the distance between the nearest somethings to me. It is not measured in arms. It is measured in the patient crawl of light across dark I will never fill.
They will say, sometimes, standing in that packed and glowing room, that they feel alone. I cannot follow the arithmetic. By my reckoning they are drowning in nearness, close enough to be heard, close enough to be touched, close enough that a button on a wall can summon company.
A doorbell.
The sound of the lottery being won, again, on an ordinary evening.