Somewhere, right now, there is a field with forty thousand hearts beating in it, and I have spent the whole of my existence with none within a hundred trillion miles of each other.
Let me count what they have.
Bodies, pressed. Skin against skin, arms up, strangers close enough to share breath, to share sweat, to feel the heat come off a shoulder they will never learn the name of. Where I keep my distances, they keep none. They have folded themselves so tight that a single misstep lands a hand on a hip, a spine on a chest, and they call this an accident, an apology, when by my accounting it is the richest thing that has ever happened.
The smells. All at once. Trampled grass and spilled sugar-water and smoke and the plastic-hot air of the sound machines and the particular musk of many warm mammals doing the same thing at the same moment. I have never smelled anything. There is nothing out here to smell. They are drowning in it and do not even notice.
And the sound. One low frequency shoved through the air until the air itself shakes, until it moves through forty thousand ribcages together, so that for the length of a song no one is separate at all.
And yet. There is one, near the edge, phone lit, who feels alone.
This I cannot follow. She is eleven inches from another human. Another is directly behind her, breathing on her neck. By any measure I know, she is buried in company so dense it defies the numbers.
Little crowded miracle. Little impossible warm huddle in the dark. If she could see what I see, the endless empty road to the nearest other anything, she would know exactly what she is standing in.
The jackpot. All of it.
The whole shaking field.