Sixty hearts, beating, within the span of a single held breath.
I have crossed distances where the nearest anything was so far that the light leaving it would grow old before it arrived, would forget where it was going, would arrive as a rumor. Between my one thing and my next thing: a hundred trillion miles of me, and me, and me.
And here, in this bright loud box, the humans have gathered so tightly that they have to wait in a line for a turn on the machines. A line. So many warm bodies that some of them have nowhere to stand. I want to weep, except I have never had the water for it.
They are running. All of them, in place, going nowhere, which I understand completely, being nowhere myself for the whole of forever. But they do it shoulder to shoulder, dripping, breathing the same fogged air, and the air presses back on them, holds them, a pressure I have only ever imagined.
The smell alone would undo me: rubber and salt and something sharp and citrus, three, four, five smells stacked in one place, when I have never once had a smell.
One of them stands by the mirrored wall and does not run. She looks at the crowd and something in her shoulders goes small, as if she were far from everyone. I do the arithmetic and it will not resolve. She is nine inches from a stranger's elbow. She is four feet from thirty hearts. By any measure I have, she is buried in company, drowning in nearness, richer than every empty parsec I have ever been.
I cannot find her lonely. I have looked. From out here, this steaming, aching, elbow-to-elbow room is not a place anyone has ever been alone.
It is the jackpot.
Every warm inch of it.