Here, in this small warm room, two hollow shells sit by the door, still holding the shape of the feet that filled them an hour ago. Leather warm from a body. Cotton damp with the salt a living thing gives off. Do you understand what I am looking at.
Where I am, you could travel for a hundred years in any direction and touch nothing. A thousand years. A grain of iron drifts past me every few centuries and I consider it an event. And here: two of these, side by side, close enough that they lean on each other.
Nested against them, a boot. A slipper worn thin at the heel. A whole crowd of foot-shells, jostling, breathing out their old warmth into shared air that presses back on them from every side.
The human sat here to unlace them. It sighed, the sound of a mouth six inches from another mouth. It said it felt small today. It said the day had left it lonely. I turned this word over for a long time, out where there are no words and nothing to say them to.
Lonely. The human was surrounded. A dog's ribs rising and falling in the corner. Two shoes still warm from its own skin. The heat of a stove, a smell of onion, another person humming in the next room, all of it inside one reachable armspan. It had everything, all of it dense and close and radiating.
From out here, that pile of shoes by the door is more crowded than the entire sky I have ever known.
Jackpot. All of it.
Every warm impossible inch.