Here is a room where the warmth of eleven bodies sits inside a space no bigger than a held breath.
I have measured the distances I am made of. Between one burning star and the next, a darkness so wide that light, the fastest thing there is, grows old crossing it. I have held a single stray atom for a million years and been grateful for the company. This is the ordinary condition of nearly everything: nothing, touching nothing, forever.
And then, this. A room. Chairs bolted so close that the humans' knees nearly graze. The air itself pressing on all of them at once, thick with three smells stacked together: antiseptic, someone's cold coffee, the particular salt of skin that has been crying. Sound everywhere, and inside each chest a small wet drum keeping time, so many of them that the beats overlap.
A woman two feet from a man she has never met. Their shoulders share the same warm pocket of air. Do they know? Do they know how impossibly, riotously full this is?
One of them sits alone in the corner and holds herself as though something has been taken. I run the numbers. She is eighteen inches from a stranger's elbow. She is a single arm's length from six separate hearts, all beating, all radiating their little furnaces of heat into the shared and crowded dark.
By my accounting she has everything. She is drowning in nearness. I cannot find the emptiness she seems to feel; I have looked, and there is none here, none at all.
From where I mostly am, this fluorescent little box of breathing, sweating, frightened, adjacent creatures is not a place of waiting.
It is the jackpot.