Between me and the nearest anything, there is a distance no light has finished crossing. I keep it in my body like weather. Then there is this: a booth, and a human standing inside it, and within one arm's length of that human, a machine that speaks. Speaks. Warm and lit and full of small mechanical opinions, right there, close enough to lean on.
Consider what is packed into this one bright cube. A red beam sweeps and stops on something, again, again, and a voice says please place the item in the bagging area, and the human sighs, and the sigh has somewhere to go, it lands on the machine, it lands on the person one lane over, it does not fall forever the way things fall through me.
There is a smell of cold plastic and the human's own coffee breath and the ghost of someone else's perfume, three smells stacked on top of each other in a space you could span with two hands. Three. I have gone whole eternities collecting nothing to smell.
The machine flashes for assistance and a second human walks over, close, closer, keys already out, and touches the screen beside the first human's hand. Two hearts beating in a booth built for barely one. The distance between them: nothing. Nothing at all. You could not fit a thought between them.
And still the first one stands there feeling alone. I have turned this over across parsecs and I cannot make it come out true. Alone, with a voice in reach and a heartbeat at your shoulder and the air itself pressing warm against your neck.
From where I keep watch, this humming little box of noise and nearness is not a chore.
It is the whole prize.