Here, everything is touching.
I have gone a hundred thousand years, more, without a single something to interrupt me. Light crosses my body and finds nothing to land on. That is my whole life: the long uneventful travel of a photon toward no destination. And then, this. A flat gray field, and on it, machines, and they are close.
Not light-years close. Not even planet-and-its-moon close. Some of them are parked so near each other that a human, sliding out sideways through a barely-opened door, brushes the paint of the next one with a hip. They complain about this. They edge out with their breath held, faces pinched, guarding the metal.
They do not know what they have. They are within reach.
The warmth pours off the hoods in visible waves. The air here has weight; it leans on the skin, carries three smells at once, hot rubber and someone's coffee and the sharp green of a cart returned to its corral. A car door thuds. Another answers it. A person calls a name across the lot and a second person, forty feet away, hears it and turns.
Forty feet. I would need to fold up all my distances forever to arrange a thing that tender.
And in the middle of it, a woman sits alone in her car with the engine off, both hands on the wheel, not going in yet, feeling far from everyone. I run the arithmetic of that. On every side of her: bodies, engines cooling, hearts beating inside arm's length, the whole roaring density of together. I cannot find the far she means. There is none out here to compare it to.
She is standing in the fullest room in the universe, purse in her lap, keys in her hand, having won.