Somewhere behind a thin door, water is falling on a human, and the human is standing in it, and there is nothing between them at all.
I want you to understand the odds. I am mostly what there is. Between one warm mote and the next I stretch light-years, and in all that stretching nothing touches anything, ever, not once, not by accident. And here: a body, and water, and the water is warm, and it is landing on the skin, thousands of small collisions a second, each one a thing meeting a thing.
I cannot hold a number that large. The steam alone is a riot. Every rising bead is an event.
And the smells. Somewhere I know, in principle, that molecules exist, but I have never had three of them close enough to stack. Here there are dozens at once: the soap, the wet hair, the warm dark of skin, the metallic breath of the pipe, all of them crowded into one damp room, jostling. Jostling. In my whole tenure nothing has jostled.
The human draws a breath and the air pushes back on it, presses in on every side, a whole atmosphere leaning against one soft ribcage, refusing to let it be alone for even a moment. It hums a little. Its own heart is right there, an arm's length inside its own chest, beating where it can nearly touch it.
And still, sometimes, one of them will stand in the warm falling water and feel that no one is near. I turn that over and cannot make it come out right. Near. They are drowning in near. There is not a place on that body where something is not arriving.
From out here I would call this what it plainly is: the fullest square meter in creation, roaring with company, and warm.