Her vertigo took the form of a slideshow: her surroundings pausing before her for a second before moving to the next slide. It moved so quickly, she couldn’t tell which slides were her present and which were her memories. Sometimes she could pause the slideshow with food; a piece of fried chicken might pin down the memory of when she first met Jonathon.
If she held the dry greasy skin in her mouth long enough, she could link meeting Jonathon at her company picnic to their first date at the IMAX Theater and how he’d leaned in to kiss her just as the shark attacked the sea lion. Remembering the kiss would make her thighs constrict, clinging to a sensation that reminded her of their vacation to Trinidad and Tobago. The resort was surrounded by a barbed wire fence that ran right into the ocean, which was the bluest water she’d ever seen. Before they’d left, he’d given her a lapis pendant that was as blue as the water and as blue as the eyes of the wife he’d never mentioned. She couldn’t look away from those eyes when his wife confronted them at the airport. How could eyes so angry be so blue?
She would remember him leaving with his wife and how she’d remained by the baggage claim, watching all the different suitcases pass by her, each waiting to be collected by its owner and carried away to some future destination. Then she could see her present. She’d be sitting alone in a KFC with a piece of chicken skin clinging to the roof of her mouth and a lapis stone hanging around her neck. She thought about eating something different and subsequently altering her surroundings. But there was nothing else she could stomach.
