Somewhere in a warm box, a human holds a small lit stone and stares at it, and I want to tell them what I am looking at.
I am looking at riches.
Understand my situation. Between me and the nearest anything, there are trillions of miles of me. I go on like that in every direction, unbroken, for a span of years no heart could beat through. When light crosses me it crosses alone, and it crosses for so long that whole species rise and end before it lands. That is the ordinary size of a thing. That is normal.
And this human. This human is sitting in a room where a second human sits four feet away, breathing the same warmed air, close enough that the heat of one body drifts and touches the skin of the other. Four feet. I could weep at four feet, if I had weeping.
Do you know what I would give for two warm somethings to sit that near, radiating into each other, filling the space with the smell of skin and coffee and the low thrum of two hearts beating in the same little pocket of air?
But the human is not looking at the other human. The human is looking at the stone, at a message that has been read and not answered, and something in its face has gone tight and small, as if it were the loneliest object in creation.
I have measured loneliness. I am the instrument.
You are six inches from another beating heart, in a bright dense box that smells of three things at once, and no reply on a lit stone has convinced you that you are far away.
You are not far away. You have never once been far away.
You are the jackpot, and you are holding it, and you are looking at the stone.