Kissing Frogs

The opening of that door sets off a chain of events. One door closes another opens, such an innocent commonly used phrase. In this instance, the door in question should have had a sign on it saying ‘Danger. Keep Out.’ but it didn’t. Like the character in the horror movie who goes in to the darkened room when we absolutely know they shouldn’t because we know the baddies and monsters are there and we are yelling at them not to, we always want to go through those doors. Truthfully, it wouldn’t have made a difference no matter how big the sign. Perhaps if Toby had carried her bags in, had stopped for a chat with some of the engineers who he knew, events would have been disrupted, but he didn’t and once that door closes behind her, everything changes.

There are many theories about memory, how accurate our memories are, that they are a type of fiction, not a perfect recording of events, that remembering is an act of storytelling, and our memories are only ever as reliable as the most recent story we told ourselves. The stories of our lives, how we remember events, are rarely as accurate as we might think. Memory can be unreliable, things added, subtracted to make sense of scraps that resurface. We’ll often embellish a tale from our past, or fill gaps in our memory where cognitive processes fail. But, not all memories are created equal. Some will last longer. For Liz, the memories of this day, though sometimes she questions them, are vivid, vibrant. Perhaps she doesn’t recall everything exactly as it was said, or the things that happened, but the sensations and the feeling that she had looked over a precipice and decided to jump, remain inescapable. She sees the office, the desks, the dust in the air that was being blown about by the heat from all the equipment, Ken and his blue suit and yellow and blue tie. The smell and the taste and the feel of the day still linger in her nose, at the back of her throat. The rumble of the traffic from outside the open window, the smell of baking bread from the bakery next to the supermarket and the waft of rotting vegetables from the skips down the side alley. No air conditioning and it was hot and stuffy and the air was full of static. And this is where she meets the Frog Prince and the kissing and a lot more, begins.