Six of them, standing in a single lit room, and every one within reach of another.
I have gone whole stretches of myself, real distances, where the nearest anything was a hydrogen atom drifting alone, and then another one so far past it that the first had forgotten there was such a thing as company. That is the ordinary density where I live. Almost nothing, spread very thin, forever.
And here: warmth pouring off skin in every direction. Breath on breath. The salt smell of effort layered over rubber, over the sweet chemical bloom of somebody's drink, three separate smells occupying the same small volume, refusing to take turns. Hearts, plural, all beating within an arm's length of each other. Metal clanging. The soft slap of feet. So much happening that the sounds have to overlap because there isn't room for them to wait.
One of them lifts a glowing rectangle toward the wall that shows the room doubled, and holds very still, and captures the moment. Good. I approve of keeping it. A place this full is worth a record.
But this one, the one holding the rectangle, is doing the thing I have never once managed to understand. It is standing in all that heat, that noise, that press of other beating hearts, and its face has gone quiet and far, as though it were somewhere thin. As though it were alone.
I have been actually alone. I know the true measurement of it, light-years stacked on light-years of undisturbed nothing. This is not that. This one is six inches from another warm body and does not know how rich it is.
From out here, I would name this correctly. A small bright room, crowded to bursting with everything I do not have.
The jackpot.
And someone standing inside it, spending it, without looking up.