Somewhere inside this warm box, ten thousand fibers touch ten thousand other fibers, and I have been counting, and I cannot count them, and I am delighted.
Consider the arithmetic I am used to. Between one grain of matter and the next, I stack light-years, whole avenues of nothing so long that a beam of light grows bored crossing them. That is my ordinary. That is the going rate for two things to be near each other out here: almost never, almost nowhere.
And then this basket. A sock lies against a shirt lies against a towel, and none of them has to wait an age to feel the other. They are simply pressed together, all of them at once, still warm from some machine that beat heat into them, breathing out that smell, that soft chemical flower-smell, which is three or four smells crowded into the same small air, and the air itself is here, pushing gently on everything, present, touching every surface without being asked.
In my whole vast estate I have no air. I have never once been touched.
The human lifts the basket to a hip. Skin against fabric against skin. Two hearts in the same room, both of them beating, close enough to hear.
I hear the human sometimes think it is alone.
I turn this over slowly, in all the room I have. I have more room than anything that exists, and I feel fine, I promise, but I cannot make the numbers agree. Alone is my address. Alone is a hundred billion miles between me and the nearest anything. This human stands an arm's length from another warm body, inside a box of warm cloth, inside a room full of pressing air.
By my accounting, that is not lonely.
That is the jackpot.