what he felt and what they talked about in the park on a sunny afternoon while the rest of the world was at work.

they were sitting on tall, patchy grass on the side of a hill. they sat like semi-reclined beach chairs, with their lower halves resting on the slight slope of the hill, but their backs propped up by their elbows, spines slack and concave, lazy parabolas lifting above the earth, the ground too spotty with dirt and whatever grime to fully commit to it without a blanket. they overlooked the field on which the compact mexicans played soccer, the gangly white dudes played ultimate, and on which, if they had ever gotten a single play off after deliberating their rules for an endless amount of time - and jake had never seen that they had - the mountainous black guys would have played flag football.

in the center of the field, whose grass was very well-manicured by city parks standards, was an undulating lake of powdery light brown dirt that sparkled like sand in the sun. now the field was peppered with random sun bathers. the eye darted to a bare female back, the untied strings of a bikini top peeking out from underneath either side, like a secret whispered in earshot.

years ago jake would have looked at the dirt lake as a failure of municipal maintenance, but now he saw it as a triumph of summer: the residue of legs kicking and running, maybe even a diving stop (over the course of the summer, there had to have been at least a few). the people sweated salt water, and the field sweated grass. soon the air would cool and the sweat would evaporate; the grass would wither and die in the cold. the field would be resod in the spring. how undeniably cyclical it all was. he had been thinking of it as a sin curve, but it was a circle. it wasn't up, down, up, down. it was around and around. jake felt, on the edge of his consciousness, from whence he couldn't quite reel it in and hold it in his hands and examine it, that there was a significant difference there. he sensed that as he got older, this distinction would seep further and further into the center of his consciousness. (this would be a natural progression; it had taken him all of his adolescent years and then some to bend and twist the ever-increasing upwards slope he had discerned in childhood into the sin curve.) (how much more hand-wringing and how many more callouses on his fingers it would take before he would realize he had fashioned the circle.)

a breeze passed through, lightly stirring the dirt lake, softly rustling the tall grass. jake's skin received the breeze like it used to absorb mary's soft blowing on his face, around this time of day in the sweltering apartment, after theyd collapsed back on the bed in a moistened heap, over the course of some summer in the past. (pleasantly) surprisingly, this visceral reverberation had no tinge of melancholy - only nostalgia.

the circle had no peaks or troughs, only curves.

a jogger jaunted past, on the path which circumscribed the field.

'i love running,' alden said.

'i do, too,' said jake, with a conviction that he wasnt lying, but uncertain as to whether he was being completely truthful. 'i ran the big loop in prospect park for the first time last week.' jake had felt love during that run, and all through the day that followed it, but in between dates with running he was always unsure of his feelings. now, as if he were at a cocktail party looking at a long-term girlfriend through the eyes of a friend to whom he had just introduced her, a fresh appreciation, with an attendant affection, sprung up inside him.

now jake wanted to talk about her. 'i love how the big loop takes you around that pond,' he said.

'and i love that downhill stretch, right after youve rounded the pond,' alden said.

'yeah,' jake said, feigning remembrance of this. the entire run had seemed uphill, sometimes level, at best. 'and it was raining most of my run. it was epic.'

'that's the perfect word for running,' alden said. 'epic. it's absolutely epic.'

another breeze, an ohm in which they could meditate on the epicness.

'running is the only thing that makes me feel like a kid again,' alden said. 'before a run, that nervous feeling that youre getting yourself into something that might be too big for you.'

jake thought ('like asking a girl out'). but what he said was, 'it's funny you put it like that. i viscerally associate running with water. specifically with swimming to the deep end of the pool. running feels like something very deep and unknown.'

jake realized that if he didnt feel love for running, he certainly felt reverence. you could love something without revering it, but could you revere something without loving it? he didnt think he could.

he loved running too.