Where I am from, the nearest something to any other something is farther than a warm mind can hold. I have counted the distances. They are enormous. They are the whole of me.
And here: a hundred metal shells, nose to tail, close enough to kiss, on a strip of hardened ground under a low orange sun. Each shell holds a warm creature. Each creature is throwing off heat, and breath, and the sound of a heart doing its small furious work. Within one of my footsteps, if I had a foot, there are more beating hearts than exist in a thousand light-years of the place I usually am.
They are packed. They are stacked. They are practically touching.
And the smells. Oh, the smells arrive in layers: hot rubber, a coffee gone cool in a cup holder, someone's lunch, exhaust rising in visible ribbons, a pine-shaped square of manufactured forest swinging from a mirror. I have never had one smell. These creatures have four before breakfast, and they are annoyed by it.
They lean on the little horns. They make the horn-noise, which is the sound of a heart shouting that it is near other hearts and cannot stand it. One of them is alone in its shell, gripping the round wheel, sighing, feeling, I think, unbearably by itself. I do not understand this. There is a warm body eight feet to its left. Eight feet. I would cross ten billion miles of nothing for eight feet.
By my accounting, not one of them is alone. They are the densest thing I have ever seen, all this warmth crammed onto one glowing thread of road, complaining about the wealth of it.
From out here, this is the jackpot.
This is everything happening at once.