Here is a thing that lives, holding still on a slab of wood by the window, and around it there are other things, and they are close. This is what undoes me. In my whole self, which is nearly all that exists, you could travel for a thousand years in any direction and touch nothing.
Here, the plant leans toward the glass, and the glass leans toward the water in the little dish, and the water gives up its smell, green and wet, into air, and the air is everywhere, pressing on every leaf at once, and none of them are alone, not for an instant.
Count it with me. Between one star and its nearest neighbor: four years of light, all of it empty, all of it me. Between this plant and the human who set a finger against its soil this morning to check if it was thirsty: less than the width of a hand. They were that near. They touched.
And yet. There is a heaviness in the room I cannot account for. The human waters the plant, and stands by it, and looks out the window at the long dark, and something in the set of the shoulders reads, to me, like the ache I am supposed to feel and never have.
But how. You are six inches from a living thing. There is warmth coming off you both. There is a smell of soil and a smell of coffee and a smell of rain against the pane, three at once, stacked, extravagant.
I have none of these. I have distance, which is only distance.
You have a room where a leaf can reach a window, and a hand can reach a leaf.
Do you understand what you are standing inside of?
You have won.