Here they are, gathered so close they keep touching each other by accident, and no one moves away.
I have gone light-years without touching anything. I have stretched between one star and the next and found, along all that reaching, exactly nothing: no warmth, no edge, no other. Here, in this small paneled room, a hundred bodies are packed within one another's breath. Their heat pools. Their shoulders press.
When one of them shakes, the two beside it lean in until three separate warmths become one warmth, and I would give the entire distance from here to the nearest sun to know what that is like even once.
The air is thick with things stacked on things: cut flowers going slightly sweet, wax smoke, coffee somewhere in a back room, the wool of coats, salt on their faces. Where I live, one molecule may drift a thousand years before it meets another. Here they crowd a single cubic foot, jostling, all at once, a riot of nearness.
And in the front, in the long box, one of them has gone still. The others have come from great distances to be near it, near enough to touch the wood. This I understand: proximity is the only wealth. What I cannot follow is why so many of them stand shoulder to shoulder and still say, quietly, into damp cloth, that they feel *alone.* Alone. Six inches from a beating heart. Surrounded by warmth on every side.
I have done the honest arithmetic of alone. This is not it. This is the opposite, crammed into one room, more closeness than the whole dark could assemble in a billion years.
From out here it is unmistakable.
They are all, every last one of them, holding the jackpot in both hands and weeping over it.