It was something so fundamentally simple, puerile, and yet so complete in its ecstasy. She felt like a dog, her head protruding from the backseat window of the cerulean BMW like something obscene. Her hair was being tossed and thrown about by the wind like something torn apart and discarded. She closed her eyes to the wall of gelid, San Francisco air that reached through her lips and crept its way into her lungs. She imagined that she could follow it throughout her body, feeling this essence of the city dispersing through her bloodstream, nourishing all of the cells that made up her being.
At this infinitesimal moment in her infinitesimal life, she felt so fundamentally connected to this world that she was speeding through so loudly, obtrusively, raucously. Through her lips came the stories of thousands of people going about their lives, living in this indiscernibly small dot on the map of the world. It was a humbling thought, that this was just another journey that this air had taken after being processed and taken in by so many others. This visceral highway that it was travelling was only one of thousands, just another indistinguishable transitory road, the kind that is littered with gas stations, ramshackle homes, motels, and wreaks of a backcountry monotony that the more metropolitan people find utterly quaint and despicable. As quickly as it had trickled down her throat, the air was gone, redistributed into the atmosphere to grant life to others as it had to her. She savored the feeling of the inspiring exhalation as it quickly rushed from her lungs. It was soon replaced by another, equally cool, crisp, and San Franciscan, as the last, carrying with it an identical sense of humility and autumnal retrospection.
