Look at this. Ten thousand droplets of water, each one a small wet miracle, falling out of the sky in a place where a person is standing, and the person has chosen to stay dry. To do this they hold up a black membrane on thin ribs, a little roof carried by hand, and the water drums against it: tick, tick, tick, tick, hundreds of tiny arrivals per second, a whole percussion of touch.
In me, a thing might travel a thousand years and touch nothing. Here, the sky touches this person constantly, and they have built a device specifically to negotiate the touching.
The water smells of stone and ozone and the underside of things. The person smells of wool and coffee and warm scalp. These smells stand next to each other. They stack. Somewhere I contain no smell at all, have never contained one, will not for the length of time it takes stars to burn down to embers.
And here is the part that undoes me. Under the little roof there is often room for two. I have watched them tilt the membrane sideways, pull a second warm body in against the shoulder, so that four feet splash through the same puddles and one dome keeps the whole sky off both.
They are pressed together. They are breathing each other's breath. And still, sometimes, one of them stares out from under the fabric at the gray street as though something is missing, as though they are far from something. I cannot find the distance they mean. I have measured everything. There is none.
The rain, the wool, the coffee, the second heartbeat six inches away, all of it under one held-up roof in the falling water. Do they know. Do they know what they are standing in the middle of.
The jackpot.
They are standing in the jackpot.