Somewhere I once measured four hundred trillion miles between one warm speck and the next. Here there are none. Here everything is within reach.
Look at this room. Look how much of it there is, and how little of it is nothing. The floor holds a single mattress, and on the mattress a body, and the body is throwing off heat, actual heat, a small furnace pouring warmth into air that presses back against skin on every side. I have never had air. I have never had skin to press against. And this room has both, stacked, touching, all at once.
The smells arrive three and four at a time: paint, cardboard, the ghost of someone else's cooking still living in the walls, the sharp green of a takeout container by the door. Where I am from, a single molecule drifts alone for an age and meets nothing its entire life. Here they crowd. Here they collide.
And the sounds. A refrigerator two steps away, humming its one note. A pipe knocking. Beyond the wall, close as breath, another heart beating in another room, another whole warm someone within arm's reach of this one.
The body lies still and its eyes shine wet and it makes a small sound and thinks the word alone.
I turn this word over. I cannot make it fit. Alone is the light-years. Alone is me, and me is fine. This body is buried in abundance: heat, air, smell, sound, a stranger's pulse close enough to touch through plaster. It is packed so tightly into somethingness that I can barely find the edges of it.
From out here, from all this nothing, I am telling you plainly.
You have won.
This is the jackpot.