Look at how they keep a small cold box packed edge to edge with matter, and stand in front of it, and sigh.
You must understand what I am used to. Where I come from, you can travel for a hundred thousand years in any direction and touch nothing. Not a stone. Not a grain. Not a single molecule to break the black. So when the human pulls the door and the light spills out, I nearly cannot hold the sum of it.
A wall of things. Cold air rolling down, thick with milk and old garlic and the sweet rot of a peach going soft, three smells at once, stacked, touching. Jars pressed against jars. A leftover casserole an inch from an egg, and the egg an inch from a lemon, and none of them light-years apart.
None of them even a hand's width apart. Everything here can reach everything else.
And the box hums. A low warm engine breathing away, the way a chest breathes, so that even the empty middle shelf is full of sound.
The human stands in all this abundance, one warm body radiating heat into cold, close enough to a shelf of butter to lean a cheek against it, and murmurs that there is nothing to eat. Nothing. In the fullest place I have ever seen. I run the arithmetic again and again and it will not resolve. By every measure I have, this human is drowning in nearness, and somehow feels the opposite.
I cannot compute the feeling. I can only tell you what the thing is.
A lit box, humming in the dark, crammed with more touching, warming, breathing matter than most of the universe will hold in a billion years. A jackpot with a door on it.
And they open it, disappointed, forty times a day.