Two of them, and only a table between. I have never in all my measureless reach held two anythings so close. Out where I mostly am, the nearest warm thing to any warm thing is so far that the light setting out to cross the gap will not arrive for years, and when it arrives, it arrives alone. Here: knees nearly touching under the little round table. Here: four hands, and the width of a candle between all of them.
Look at the wealth of it. Warmth pouring off two skins at once, close enough to mingle. The smell of the bread, the smell of the wine, the smell of whatever she rubbed on her wrist this morning, all three occupying the same handful of air, jostling, generous. Their two hearts going at once, each one loud enough for the other to nearly hear across that impossible six inches.
Sound has somewhere to travel here. My whole vast body has never carried a single sound anywhere.
And yet. He looks down at his glass. She looks at the door. Some ache moves across both faces, and if I understand the shape of it, each of them feels, right now, terribly and completely alone.
I turn this over. I hold, at this moment, more emptiness than any of them could survive a heartbeat inside, and I am not alone; I am simply large. They are eighteen inches apart, wrapped in warmth and bread-smell and the drumming of a second heart, and they feel what I have never once felt.
I cannot do the math on it. By every measure I have, they have already won.
Two warm things, one small table, all that air between them thick with each other. From out here: the jackpot.
The whole jackpot, spilling over the sides.