Six people are standing in the small warm box, and each of them is close enough to touch.
I want you to understand what that means. Where I am, the nearest anything to anything else is measured in years of light. A photon born inside a star can travel my whole width and find nothing to land on, ever, and I am mostly what there is. So when I look at this room, this ordinary afternoon of cardboard and folding chairs, I nearly cannot count the riches.
Warmth pours off every body. The air itself is thick enough to carry sound, so that when one of them speaks, the words simply arrive at the others, free, no distance to cross. There is cake. There is the smell of cake and coffee and someone's perfume, three separate somethings stacked in the same handful of space.
Astonishing. I have never held even one smell.
They are passing a card around. They keep touching each other on the arm, the shoulder, the back of the neck, brief and deliberate, as if pressing proof into the skin. One of them holds a box of belongings against her chest and her eyes are leaking, and the others move closer, not further, until she is surrounded on every side by warmth she could reach in an instant.
I have watched, and I do not fully understand. She feels she is losing something. But look: they are all still here. Every one of them within a single arm's length, still radiating heat, still making sound that reaches her. By my accounting she has lost nothing at all. She has everything.
Six warm bodies in a box the size of a whisper. Out here, that is the jackpot.
That is the whole prize.