Somewhere in me, right now, a beam of light is crossing a distance so wide it will arrive nowhere for a hundred thousand years. That is the usual density of things: one lonely photon, and then more of me, and then more.
And then there is this.
A door that turns, and inside its turning, warmth. Four little wedges of trapped air, each one thick with breath and coat-wool and the wet-wool smell of outside on someone's shoulders, and every wedge holds a person, sometimes two, packed close enough that their sleeves whisper against the glass and against each other.
The rubber seals sigh. The brass push-bar is warm from a thousand palms that touched it in the last hour. A thousand. In an hour. I have gone eons between contacts.
Watch the timing of it. A human steps in just as the compartment opens, and for three full seconds another human breathes the same small pocket of air, close enough to feel the heat coming off a stranger's neck, and then the door releases them both back into rooms that are also, unbelievably, full. They do this without ceremony. They do this while looking at their phones.
One of them, I notice, has her jaw set and her eyes down, and she is thinking, I can tell, that no one in this whole crowded building knows her. She is six inches from a man's shoulder. Six inches. I cannot make the arithmetic work. By my measure she is standing inside another heartbeat. By my measure she is drowning in company.
A machine whose only job is to hold you against the cold and hand you, warm, into a warm place, one impossible closeness at a time.
The jackpot spins, and spins, and lets more of them in.