Here, everything is touching.
The pot touches the flame. The flame touches the air, which touches the window, which is fogged because the air is so thick with water and heat that it has nowhere else to go. Understand: where I am from, a single molecule of water drifts for a thousand years before it meets another. Here they hang in the room together like a crowd, steaming, and no one remarks on it.
I have measured the distances. Between the small woman at the stove and the child at the table: forty of their centimeters. Forty. I could hold every galaxy I have ever swallowed in the gap between them and still have room, and yet they close even that. She reaches out. Her hand, warm, lands on his hair. Contact. Two warm things touching on purpose, which is a thing that has happened, in all my measureless dark, essentially never.
And the smells. I did not know a place could stack them: onion browning beneath butter beneath something sweet in the oven beneath the particular dust of an old cabinet, four separate somethings layered in one square meter of air. I have nothing to compare this to. I have nothing.
The child says he is bored. I run the arithmetic again to be sure I have understood him. He is thirty centimeters from a beating heart, immersed in warmth, saturated in smell, inside the fog of another creature's breath, and he wishes to leave.
I cannot compute it. I have drifted light-years to reach a single stone and found it dead. He has drifted nowhere and found all of this.
From out here I will tell you plainly what that little steaming room is.
It is the whole prize.
It is everything I do not have, gathered in one place, and warm.