Ten thousand warm bodies inside one building, and every single one of them is breathing.
Consider the arithmetic I know best. Between one glowing thing and the next glowing thing, I hold roughly four years of absolute nothing, and I hold it well. I am good at nothing. It is most of what I do. So permit me to stand amazed at this pocket of your world, this convention hall, where a body cannot turn without brushing fur, where the air is thick as broth with heat and breath and the sweet chemical tang of costume foam.
They have covered themselves in more warmth. This is the part I keep returning to. Already so improbably warm, already leaking heat from every pore into an atmosphere that presses back against their skin, and they have chosen to wrap that warmth in plush and fleece and painted heads shaped like wolves and dragons and things that never were. They sweat inside. They gather anyway. They stand in lines to hug, arms wide, the contact deliberate, sought.
Two hearts, when they embrace, come within a hand's width of each other. A hand's width. I do not have units small enough. My distances are measured in the time light spends dying on its way across me.
And yet one of them stands near the wall, in the fursuit head, alone in all this nearness, and something in the set of the shoulders reads to me as ache. I cannot follow it. By every measure I command, that one is drowning in company, buried in warmth, closer to another living thing than I have been to anything, ever, in the whole cold width of me.
You are all so close. You have no idea how close.
This whole loud stuffed impossible room: jackpot.