34L

When Baleen met me, I was a habitual bachelor, which doesn't mean that I made a habit of being a bachelor, rather that I had the habits of a household of one. I worked long hours, ate pasta from the pot it was cooked in, and exercised almost every day, either soccer, some biking, or most usually, swimming in the Bay.

I was at my heaviest then, about two hundred and ten pounds, and the ten pounds I had then that I don't have now I carried about my thorax, widened at the top and back from hours and hours of pushing the Bay away. This was also the time that I bought two new jackets, my first suit since senior year of college and the requisite navy blazer.

Two years later, when Baleen and I were planning our wedding, and when I was muddling through a decision on what to wear, Baleen told me my blue blazer didn't fit. It has to, I said, it's brand new. It doesn't fit, she said. She was right, it hung loose and limp like a hand me down ski jacket. It was no use protesting that she was the reason it didn't fit anymore, that I had spent evenings biking to her apartment in Pac Heights rather than in the Bay. You'll have to buy a new one, she said. Instead, I swam like mad for a month until my shoulders filled it, and then watched them shrink again from disuse. Maybe, just maybe, today, my fourth day of swimming in the Aegean, my wedding blazer might fit again and Baleen might look at me like she did when I was 29.