Growing up I always wanted to be like the girls I knew from the basketball team and schoolbus stop, who transformed the humble act of eating into dramatic relationships with food. I longed to feel their baffling latenight passion for greasy bags filled with Taco Bell and Fatburger. I was secretly jealous of their protracted flirtations with dieting, the way they made it a staple of conversation and basked in the attention. I wanted to act coy like them in the presence of snacks and desserts, drawing attention to my figure with comments like “That’ll just go right to my butt!” Except I never got a butt. Or boobs. Or any curves at all, really. I just grew even taller and even skinnier, and nothing I put in my mouth made any difference to the scale in our bathroom. Finally I resigned myself to liking food enough to eat it, the same way I liked Saman’s picture enough to marry him when I was 18.

But nothing has been the same since Chirbampo, when I got sick and passed out and hit my head.

Now food and I have a relationship with a capital R. A prickly dysfunctional passive-aggressive relationship, like something worthy of a Dr. Phil intervention. Meals have devolved into culinary dating. I read about an entree in the menu, and discuss it with Nick, and get a personal reference from the waitron, and risk ordering it, and push the food around my plate, and sample a teensy weensy bite, and push it around my plate some more, and if my nose likes the aroma and my tongue likes the taste and my stomach likes whatever it is that non-nauseous stomachs like, then I finally — finally — swallow a couple mouthfuls.

That’s why I’ve gotten in the habit of playing with my food. Especially at breakfast, when my newly problematic relationship with food is at its worst. The plate just stares up at me like an accusation. I need to do SOMETHING to distract myself, you know?

So I paint my crabcake patty with ketchup, and garnish it with papas fritas — french fries — and steal two tortilla chips from Nick’s bean soup breakfast, and voila:

I like today’s masterpiece so much that I memorialize it with a click of my antique Polaroid camera. Flapping the picture to develop it, I push the plate across the table proudly. “See? Proof of my artistic genius!”

Nick pauses with a spoonful of soup halfway into his mouth. “What is it?”

“What is it?” I echo, surprisingly wounded. So this is what it feels like to be a misunderstood artiste. “It’s a kitty, duh. A kitty…with kind of a butterfly body. Like, half-kitty, half-butterfly.” I yank the plate back.

“You’re such a Nooshball,” he says lightly, but his angular face is concerned. “So in other words, you’re not eating that, huh?”

“I’m sure I’ll be hungry for lunch.” But I can’t imagine how, glancing down at my breakfast. The ketchup is suddenly a stench assaulting my nostrils, and the crabcake is a yucky texture I can already feel sliding down my throat, and –

“Nooshin? You okay?”

I’m staring up at the fly-specked ceiling and panting through my mouth, trying not to vomit. A dangling fan thrashes the humid air. I count the revolutions of its dust-streaked blades in multiples of ten — 10, 20, 30, 40…

“Hey. You okay?” Nick tries again, but with less urgency this time. The risk that I’ll become a fountain of barf is steadily diminishing.

Finally the nausea passes and I risk lowering my chin again. The restaurant levels back into view, an open room with crustacean husks nailed to the dirty walls. They seem oddly alive in the pinkish dawn pouring through the windows. Sitting across from me is an alarmingly handsome man, staring at me with eyes the color of frozen swimming pools. His head is almost shaved, a stubble that falls into dagger-like sideburns across his cheekbones. Muscles coil beneath the tight skin of his shoulders and arms, and his gray ribbed wifebeater is contoured over a chest bigger than mine. Out in the aisle his bare knee is pistoning.

“What if this is morning sickness?” I ask Nick plaintively, hating my tone of voice. “What if I’m…” I don’t dare utter the word. Emotions will coalesce around it, from my diffusion of miserable hopes and dark fears, all the feelings I hide from myself in the space between heartbeats.

He’s waving away my panic like batting a fly. “You know, there was this time I thought I had thyroid cancer. Back when I was an undergrad. I knew the symptoms, and I got so fixated on — ”

“You’re just lying to make me feel better,” I sigh.

His face is a slide show of emotions — confusion, then eye-widening surprise, and finally profound annoyance. “How the hell did you know I was lying?”

“What?”

“You heard me. How’d you know I was lying?” When I just blink at him, the corners of his mouth start twitching. “Can you read me that well? Or — I gave it away somehow, didn’t I? How?”

My cupped palms seem like a good spot to rest my face. “I can’t believe this. I’ve got morning sickness, maybe, and my boyfriend is more worried about whether people can tell he’s lying.”

There’s a silence broken only by the whirring fan — and Nick’s exasperated sigh. “You don’t have morning sickness! You’ve got a gastrointestinal infection. A bad one. But keep taking your antibiotics and you’ll be just fine.” Another exasperated sigh. “Give it a month. You’ll see.” And another sigh.

I peek through the bars of my fingers at him. “What’s on the agenda today?” I ask, hoping to distract him. Both of us, really.

Nick isn’t a vacation person. At all. His idea of relaxation is a day choked with activities — poking the speedboat into every inlet and estuary, horseback riding on the pristine Cerritos beach, exploring the picturesque streets of Old Mazatlan, swimming and snorkeling and jellyfish evasion, watching matadores and picadores train in the bullfight ring, trying new restaurants and coffee shops and internet cafes — and since I still tire easily, letting me nap while click-click-clicking on his laptop, churning out chapters of his dissertation thesis.

He sips his coffee. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking — I’d like to take the boat around Stone Island, past the cruise ship docks, and explore all the lagoons along the Estero de Urias…”

Something we discussed yesterday. Stone Island isn’t really an island at all, just a jungle-covered peninsula that elbows toward Old Mazatlan from the south, forming a giant inlet. Beyond its mouth is a narrow navigation channel dominated by humongous cruise ships that reach 10 stories into the sky, then a sprawling rickety dockwork for the shrimp fleet, and finally vast lagoons teeming with wildlife, like wintering osprey and saltwater crabs.

But Nick is already past my mental picture of the lagoons, roughing out an itinerary that includes a stop on Isla de Venados — Deer Island — for a picnic lunch, a hike inland to ancient petroglyphs, and swimming in a waterfall. Then it’s back to the condo complex to dock the speedboat, followed by a tee time at the El Cid golf course with some Australians he met in the elevator, and after that drinks with them in the clubhouse, and and and…