Here, at this gate, there is more happening in one square foot than in a hundred billion miles of me.
I have measured the distance between things where I live. It is this: nothing, then more nothing, then a photon that left a star before the star forgot it, then nothing again for so long the word "again" loses its meaning. Two atoms in my keeping may drift a thousand years and never once brush past each other.
But here. Here two of them are pressed chest to chest, arms wrapped around backs, faces buried in the warm dark of a shoulder that smells of soap and coffee and the recycled air of the terminal and, underneath, a body running hot at ninety-eight point six, radiating, wasting all that heat into the six inches of air between them, which is not empty, which is thick with breath and sound and the small vibration of a heartbeat conducted through fabric.
Six inches. I would build a religion around six inches.
They are gripping tighter now. One is crying. And I want to tell them, because I of all things would know: you have not been separated. You are still touching. Even when one walks down the jetway you will be, by my accounting, unbearably close, both of you crowded onto the same warm speck, breathing the same rare air, close enough to ache.
That is the part I cannot follow. The ache. They stand in the fullest place in the universe and grieve a distance I would call no distance at all.
Look at them. Warmth, noise, smell, another heart within reach, and the reaching allowed.
Jackpot. Every single time.
Jackpot.