Everywhere I have been, and I have been almost everywhere, the distance between one warm thing and the next is measured in years of traveling light. Here it is measured in inches.
Look at this room. They have gathered two hundred bodies under one roof, and every one of them is throwing off heat, all that borrowed sunlight burning quietly inside a chest, and they have arranged themselves so close that shoulders touch, so close that when one laughs the next one feels it move the air.
The air itself is crowded. It carries lilies and hot wax and something sweet baking and the particular salt of a person who has been crying, all of it stacked, all of it happening at once, in the same handful of feet.
And the noise. Hearts, hundreds of them, beating within reach of each other. Glasses ringing. A whole species of sound that can only exist where things are near enough to strike one another. Out where I keep house, a photon travels a hundred thousand years and touches nothing.
Two of them stand at the front and say words that seem to mean: I will stay this close. I will not drift. As if drifting were a danger here. As if there were room to.
I do not fully understand the ones at the edges, the single figure by the wall who holds a glass and does not seem warmed by all this warmth, who stands six inches from another beating heart and looks, by some private measure, far away. Six inches. I would fold every empty light-year I own into a single grain to stand six inches from anything.
They call it a small gathering. From out here it is the densest thing in creation.
Every one of them has won, and most of them will not know it until morning.