The sound of my pop music plays in my ears, turned up to the highest to drain out other sounds.

The smell of heat engulfs my nose.
The sight of the sun’s noon brightness casting off-white light on the trees moves up and down in my vision as I take each step.
The feel of my feet thumping against the gravel roads vibrates through my body.
The taste of near victory rests in the roof of my mouth.

I’m almost there, I think. After this, I’ll have lost weight, I’ll have improved my athleticism, and I’ll have something to be content, even proud of.

But the thought, that had been there for the last 10 minutes, playing over and over in my mind like the sound of my footsteps, is suddenly snatched away by something.

I find myself at an intersection. One way would lead home, but get me there far to quickly for a good burn and satisfaction. The other is made of dirt trail, stretching out into the distance as far as my eye can reach. It’s bordered on both sides by a thin row of small, plant-like trees, beyond which are fields of wild vegetation, the trail seems like something you would find at a state park.

Yet as I start running down the perhaps short perhaps infinite trail, I come to see that this place isn’t quite a state park, but is something more rare, more precious, and more beautiful.

Again, I listen to the sound of my pop music, smell the heat of the day, stare at the bright noon world, feel my footsteps against the packed dirt; but I no longer taste anything in my mouth, more an emptiness that awaits an inhabitant.

I run for around another 10 minutes, and slowly, the pop music, although turned to its loudest, dwindles into the background. I now become aware of several other sounds—the twittering of birds in the trees, the thump of my tennis shoes against the gravel, and then the sound of the air.

I hear it moving all around me, even if the movement is only minor in the hot summer’s day. The air flows with zephyrs that travel through the trees, dancing as he takes each of the leaves for a twirl before floats on through the air. I hear it entering and exiting my body, a raspy and rhythmic  song of inhales and exhales. I hear it against my skin, shuffling through my hair with its feet sideways, blowing kisses against my face. It occurs to me the strange beauty of its ability to be nowhere and everywhere at once.

I let the sounds play like music in my ears, a symphony that I am a part of. The next thing I know, the smell of the heat becomes background music too. There is a sharp yet sweet scent in the air—it comes from the flowers aside the road and some the particularly aromatic plants of the countryside. Along with that, I smell the dust beneath my feet that rises in a small cloud with each step I take, and then splits open down the middle as my foot moves through it.

The next thing I know, the bright hot world takes shape before my eyes. Not just bright, hot, and trees anymore, but an amalgam of colors and things that refused to be generalized by a single word. There are critters on the tan trail. Black ones ants and dark brown earth worms crawling around. There are tiny violets of purple and pink in the roadside vegetation. Beyond that vegetation are stalks of corn, some with their whitish yellow heads peeping out to take a look around at the world, some fully shrunken in their homes. Even beyond that are a couple—two or three—of trees with heads of dark green leaves. They remind me of llamas for some reason—perhaps because their necks are thin as sticks, and there’s a round ball of fur atop them. Even beyond that is the best part of it all: the mountains. They sit like shadows in the distance, obscured to a blur of blue-green-grey with patches of tan, almost like the ones in the paintings. And beyond those is the sky, a light blue spotted with freckles and birthmarks of white, stretching far overhead, where the sun rests.

In the countryside, although there is a single globe of condensed white-yellow somewhere overhead that is called “the sun”, the sun’s light actually comes from every direction, not in rays, but in layers. At noon, these layers wrap themselves around me like clothes in winter. The heat collects and liquifies on my skin, taking the form of shiny, glossy sweat. If one had not seen me up close, one could mistakenly think that I had a layer of plastic wrap on. And it sure felt like it.

I wipe some of the sweat off my forehead, and then half-unknowingly come to a stop.

I’m trying to taste what’s in my mouth, and it’s my saliva of course, sticky and salty like is the norm after exercise. But there’s another taste too. The taste of the countryside. Perhaps a concoction of the dust I breathed in and the pollen in the air liquified with the sweat dripping in from my upper lip. Perhaps not. It might have a formula, a definition, or it may simply be the idea that is there in my mouth.

When I look ahead of me, I see a never-ending trail. I don’t see the place I want to go back to, I don’t measure in my head the time it will take me to complete the cycle of my life—to follow the path created for me, the path I created for myself, through routine. I see a trail that may or may not end, a trail that holds things undefined, unexplored, and perhaps even unknown. I see a trail of infinity, a trail that extends so far into the countryside that time cannot get a grasp on it with its filthy hands. A trail of possibility, a trail of now and everything after it.

And so I close my ears and nose and eyes and mind and heart and soul against the end, and feel, with my newborn ears and nose and eyes and mind and heart and soul the incredible beauty of an uncertain now.

And I taste the purity of the countryside.