Living a little.

I've been dieting and trying to eat healthy the last few weeks in an renewed effort to lose the last pounds.  D is fine with it because he's also been eating blandly -- clean fuel for running -- but I know it's kind of boring.  Some days he'll gchat me at work at 4pm after his run and ask, ravenously, What do you want to do for dinner? and I, with my stomach shrunken from three days of eating homemade chicken and kale salad, will shrug at my desk and type back boringly, Whatever, I'm not that hungry.

We've both been a little bit clinical about our bodies lately.  D must eat carbs -- no ethnic, no fat -- and be in bed early on Friday nights in preparation for Saturday long runs, and sometimes races.  I spent the better part of last month monitoring myself looking for signs and patterns like a prescientific human plumbing the night sky for meaning that's not there.

Saturday, D was overcome with an urge for Spanish food and to go out, so we went to a tapas place on Pier 5 -- super early, right at opening, so that we could snag a walk-in.  We sat at the bar as the tables around us were set and started to fill up.  The room was tall and airy, all outfitted in dark wood and copper and black metal.  We watched the kitchen staff at their work, and thought about how fun it would be to cook in a kitchen like that.  White cloud-filtered light shone in diffusely from a tall window, where a stout young dark-haired woman stood cubing red and yellow watermelons for pintxos next to an industrial stand mixer.  At the counter across from us, another woman torched caramel-colored little pucks on sticks until they glistened, while another put a pastry with a dense golden crust into a toaster oven and then pulled a metal tub out of the freezer and placed it on the counter before us, where it sat giving off cold vapors.  Behind them, storage shelves reached up to the dark raftered ceiling, with something delicious stored on every level -- bottles of gin, bitters, and wine; mismatched glass canisters upon canisters filled with dried red chiles; and all the way up at the top, wire baskets filled with ropes of hard wrinkled sausage folded over themselves into loops and vacuum-sealed in plastic.

Someone brought D a glass with a cucumber and some mysterious spirits in it and presented us with an assortment of tasty, expensive things on toothpicks.  This seemed familiar... a date night like we would have, not so long ago, when our enjoyment of things was uncomplicated.  And as we looked over our menus, things didn't feel quite as complicated.  It felt like a long time since we had been out to eat bad, bad foods just for fun, so we got everything: Spanish ham, chorizo coated with egg yolk and piled with crispy potato matchsticks, garlicky shrimp, three kinds of sausage, churros, and an apple pastry with a little football-shaped scoop of blue cheese ice cream perched on top.  My taste buds woke up.  The coffee tasted like chocolate, and the chocolate tasted like fruit.

The check came in a repurposed old aluminum saffron tin about the size of a brick.  We wondered how much the original tin of saffron must have cost, and guessed at it for fun.  I meant to look up the wholesale per-ounce cost of saffron, but I forgot.

Afterwards, we took a walk down the Embarcadero.  It was gray and windy but the wind smelled clean.  We looked at a new art installation that twisted out of the ground into the shape of two giant metal neurons firing.  We peered into other restaurants where we might go.  There was a seal in the bay, lazing around, disappearing and reappearing in the water, that we watched for a while.  We sat on a bench until it started getting dark, and then we called an Uber home.

It felt a little like taking a breath after holding it for a long, long time.