Thank You Note to an Octopus

photo: Dear Sunshine - Unsplash

Dear one in the oil drum,

I came across you the way I stumble onto most things worth noticing underwater — quite by accident, in movement the speed of a saunter, through a mask fogged at the edges. There you were. One eye, rectangular, pupil like a slit of dusk, gold-ringed and wet-lit — watching me from the dark hole of an abandoned oil drum, left on the seafloor years before either of us arrived.

“I'd gotten used to moving through the world unseen. Then something with three hearts and no bones looked straight at me from an oil drum, and the quiet in me broke open.”

On land the air had been ferociously hot; underwater, body warmth came from my black neoprene wetsuit, close as a second skin. Two worlds that different from one another, and you anchored both — the most coveted sight I've had in either.

I tried not to move. That's the hardest art of diving, I've come to think — not the depth or the current, just remaining motionless, still as a hot summer night. I slowed my breathing so there'd be fewer bubbles between us and resisted the impulse to reach toward you or lift a hand to wave. Calm rewarded, you seemed to decide I might be worth the same courtesy.

And those minutes we looked at one another will yield a memory that lasts years.

"You just watched. Weighed me.
Decided, apparently, that I merited
a longer look.”

I've spent more than a decade writing notes to people who did something small and let it go unremarked — the postal clerk, the stranger extending kindness to a child, the woman who held a door a beat longer than she had to. I write to say, I see you. It occurred to me, though, hovering there near you, that I've never once considered whether the reverse might be happening. Whether being seen by a creature might be its own kind of gift.

You had no reason to hold my gaze. I wasn't food, and I wasn't a threat. You just watched. Weighed me. Decided, apparently, that I merited a longer look as you made up your mind. That's a rare thing to receive from another creature — to be looked at with actual deliberation, not glanced at and dismissed.

I think about how much of my life is spent that way — sorted, filed, moved past. Meetings where no one's really looking. Rooms where I'm background. I don't say that with self-pity; I think it's true of most people, most days. We move through the world unseen, and we get used to it, the way you get used to a low hum of a power line.

And then something with three hearts and no bones looks straight at you from an oil drum, and the hum stops.

I don't know what you made of me. Maybe nothing — maybe I registered as shape and shadow and little else, filed away in whatever passes for your memory the moment I finned off. But I made something of you. I've carried that rectangular eye around for a long time now, using it, without quite meaning to, as a kind of standard for what real attention looks like — patient, unhurried, no performance in it, nothing to gain.

I doubt you'll ever read this. As smart as octopuses are, literacy hasn't made it onto the list of things you had to learn on your own, no mother nor mentor to show you how. But I wanted to write anyway. I keep turning over how strange it is — that one of the truest moments of attention I've ever received came from a creature with no words, no stake in me, nothing at all to gain by looking twice. Some days I can still feel your eye on me, unhurried, asking nothing, and I go quiet.