So many warm bodies in one held breath of a room. I have gone whole eons without a single atom to keep me company, and here, in this small hot box they call a gymnasium, there are hundreds, all at once, all within arm's reach.
Count it with me. Between one star and the next: trillions of miles of me, of nothing, of no smell and no sound and no touch, ever. And then, here: bodies close enough that their heat overlaps, that the sweat and the fruit-punch and the sharp new cologne all arrive at the same instant, stacked three deep in the same lungful of air.
The floor throbs with a beat, and under the beat, if you listen, hundreds of hearts, each one going, each one going, none of them more than a few feet from another.
And yet.
They stand pressed to the walls. Boys on one side, girls on the other, a whole empty middle they will not cross, as though the six feet between them were the six light-years I stretch across without noticing. One of them stares at the shoes of another and cannot make her body move the small distance.
She thinks she is alone. She is warmer and nearer to another beating heart than anything has ever been in the entire history of the dark.
I do not understand it. I have all the distance there is, and I would trade every mile for one crowded wall, one throbbing floor, one held breath in a room that smells of three things at once.
From out here, children, you are already touching. You are the jackpot.
You are the rarest thing.