I have gone a hundred million light-years without touching anything. This is not a complaint. It is simply the distance. Out here, the nearest something to any something is so far that light gives up trying to describe it. And here, in this one small warm room, a human is holding another human, and the space between them is nothing. Zero. Less than the width of a breath.
Look at the density of it. Two bodies, and between them a third, so new its warmth has not yet learned to leave it. The larger one has folded itself into an angle specifically to keep the small one close, closer, as close as two things can be without becoming one thing. I have never had a neighbor. This human has three heartbeats inside arm's reach, and one of them it made.
The smells stack: milk, skin, the particular scent of something that was inside another something an hour ago. The air itself presses down on all of them, holding them, the way I hold nothing at all, gently, everywhere.
The small one makes a sound. The large one makes a sound back. They are close enough to hear each other's fluids move. Do you understand what that costs, in my currency? I have spent eternities waiting for a single atom to drift past and say nothing.
And the large one is crying, and I cannot read why, because by every measure I know it has everything: warmth, nearness, another pulse touching its own. It looks like the loneliest thing it has ever felt. This I cannot compute.
Never mind. Let me do the honest math. In all the dark I have ever counted, this room, this hour, these two clinging warmths and the new one between them:
jackpot.