I'm extremely curious regarding the story of how an octopus fell in love with you once. How did you meet the octopus? How do you know it was in love with you? Why did it fall in love with you? I NEED to know
Okay. cracks knuckles. I was exaggerating a bit about falling in love, what do I know about the internal experience of the octopus? But it was fucking cool as hell. This is what happened, as accurate to my memory as I can manage.
My family was visiting Australia for about a month, in Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter (June/July?) of like... 2013? I think it was just before one of my years of law school, or right before law school in general. We spent a week of this visiting Sydney, where we stayed at a place right on... Manley Beach? Is that something? I'm not looking it up, so if that's not a place name, that's just my memory failing me.
It was winter but the weather was gorgeous and we decided, fuck it, let's go swimming. The water was Ice Fucking Cold. This wasn't a huge problem given the warm weather. I was submerging slowly in the rocky area, like, down at the left side of that stretch of beach? Left side when you're facing the ocean. It wasn't just tide pools, it was pretty deep, up to my waist. The bottom of it was large rounded rocks with some vegetation in between, the occasional fish. The water was also super clear.
I was kind of bouncing around in the water when I felt something wrap around my ankle.
Knowing Australia's (we're not going to debate about whether it's deserved or not) reputation for horrifyingly deadly wildlife, I yelped. My mom was close by, and she was like, what is it, and I conveyed the situation to her. She said that it was just seaweed, don't be silly.
The next time I felt something curling around my ankle I actually saw it. It was an octopus with a body bigger than a baseball but not much bigger -- what's slightly bigger than a baseball? A mango? And its tentacles were like a foot to a foot and a half (1/3 to 1/2 meter) long. So it was little, and it was scooting away across the seafloor, and it was clearly tentacled, and right in front of my eyes it turned into a damn rock.
"That was NOT seaweed," I remember saying.
I kept still, and the rock uncurled a tentacle and then another, and it crept back across the rocks towards me. At this point I could see it really well. It reached out to me again, and at this point my curious ape tendencies took over and I reached into the water when it reached up to me. Its tentacles wrapped around my hand and fingers. It's so hard to describe. It was almost velvety, if rubbery ocean skin could be velvety. Its little suction cups were so strong and they were moving, they were alive. The whole tentacle felt like pure muscle. This was all fucking wild. And I was by far not the only one in this rocky area -- there were my two parents, there were some other people further in. This octopus was clearly curious about me. It was tasting and thinking and then it played a little tug of war with me.
Someone yelled something about 'does it have blue rings' which it did not. I had no idea how good that was at the time. Except for the size, I just think it matched what a Pacific octopus looks like, which is to say: it had no color, and it was grey, and it was all colors.
Some dudes were nearby and I think they had a camera on me? And they were like "How are you not freaked out, I would never get in the water again" and I was privately thinking this is so fucking cool I'm having a cosmic experience but what I said was "DO I NOT LOOK FREAKED OUT." So I guess I was also a little freaked out.
I went over on a solid rock ledge and sat up out of the water and it attached itself to the vertical rock surface under the water and reached tentacles up and out of the water for me, like "where are you going???" So I held its tentacles some more.
At this point, my mom tried to take some pictures. They look like me with some plain boring rocks. You cannot see the octopus in a single one of them.
Eventually we had to go, but like. Holy shit. The interaction was so clearly sentient that I have not been able to even consider eating octopus since. It wanted to know what was up with me and hang out. It was detecting something about me that was interesting that was not apparent to anyone else there, so its senses must be wildly different.
The dumbass conclusion to this story (not that dumbass because it involves an artist getting Cash Money) is that my father, in his infinite wisdom, decided to spend Two Thousand American Dollars on commissioning a wood sculpture of me with the octopus from the artist James Phillips.
AND THEN HE JUST LEFT IT WITH ME.
This thing is red wood the size of a child carved with a chainsaw and it lives in my house.
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