There is a person in a small warm box, taking the walls apart with their hands.
I want you to understand how much is here. In the space I usually keep, you could travel for a thousand years and pass one grain of dust, if you were lucky, if you begged. But this box. This box has a bed, and a wall, and the wall once held pictures, and the pictures are gone now but the wall remembers them in little pale rectangles, and the rectangles are close enough to the person that they could touch all of them without moving their feet.
Everything here is within reach of everything else. I cannot express what that is worth.
The air presses on their skin. Do you know what that is, air that presses? I have none. And it carries scent, three of them stacked: cardboard, the dust of a long-closed drawer, and something warmer coming up the stairs that I think is another person, another whole warm body, in the same box, calling a name.
The person is sitting on the floor holding a small worn thing and their eyes are leaking and they seem to believe they are alone.
This is the part I cannot do the math on. There is a second heart beating one room away. There are surely more in the boxes beyond. By my accounting they are pressed together, impossibly, gloriously, a whole cluster of warmths sharing one thin skin of air. I have run the numbers on my own distances and they do not end.
And here: a full room, a leaking-eyed person, a stack of smells, a called name, all inside one another's arm's length.
Jackpot. Every time.
Jackpot.