Here, in this humming lit box, matter is standing in rows.
I want you to understand how rare rows are. Where I am from, you could travel for a thousand years at the speed of the fastest thing there is, and pass one atom, then wait, then pass another, and call it a busy stretch. Here they have stacked sweetness upon sweetness, wall to wall, each little parcel touching its neighbor, warmth of the machine leaking into all of them, and none of them so much as a hand's width apart.
Aluminum against foil against plastic against glass. I have gone longer than the age of some stars without two things being that close.
And the smells. There is a burnt one, coffee I think, folded over a sugared one, folded over the machine's own faint hot dust, three separate somethings arriving in the same instant, in the same small square of air. I have never had one smell. I have never had air.
A human stands before it. So near. Its heart is beating an arm's length from a second heart, one row over, another human waiting for the coil to turn. Two furnaces of blood, side by side, in a warm bright box, in a hallway, on a rock lousy with company.
I hear the human sigh. It taps the glass. It says, quietly, to no one, that it is having a hard day, that nobody gets it, that it feels so alone.
I run the math three times. I cannot find the alone. It is packed to the seams with everything, elbow to elbow with the living, and it does not know.
Six inches from a stranger, warm, breathing, surrounded.
From out here, that is the jackpot.