CREATIVE NONFICTION 71
At the time, I didn’t think about how the joke meant she’d been thinking of me the
whole time she’d been away: at dinner with Brian, when she first saw the octopus slick
and gleaming on a bed of ice; on the car ride back to his apartment, the cold octopus
wrapped in a napkin in her purse; falling asleep that night, as the octopus froze in a
plastic bag in Brian’s icebox; the next morning at breakfast, when she figured out the
best way to transport the octopus back to South Carolina; and the 280 miles she drove
with it—in a cooler in the passenger seat? in the trunk, as far away as possible? in a cup
in the center console, its frozen body rattling against the sides of the plastic cup like a
strangely shaped piece of ice?
it wasn’t until my junior year in college that I learned there are two different
creation stories in the Bible. In the first one, in Genesis chapter 1, God took six days
to make everything. In the second version, in Genesis chapter 2, starting at verse 4, it
took only one day.
In the second story, God made Adam first, and then the rivers, every beast of the field,
every bird in the air. In this version, Eve came last in the story, made of Adam’s rib.
In the first story, though, God created Adam and Eve at the same time—and there
was no mention of Eve being made of Adam’s rib.
in my story, it wasn’t long before Sarah realized she couldn’t simultaneously love
me and love God, and before Kate moved back to Florida and broke it off with Brian,
who almost immediately married another girl. Years later—after I finished a master’s
degree in poetry, after Kate dated different guys, after I moved to LA, after Kate
worked as a church youth minister, after I fell for other girls, after I moved to San
Francisco, after she moved to Ireland to work for a church organization, then back to
South Carolina, and after she started seminary—she called me one night to tell me
something.
“I couldn’t see myself clearly back then,” she said. I could feel her trying to find the
right words, like a body bending over slowly to pick something up. “I’m not straight.”
“What do you mean exactly?” I asked.
“I thought that since my experience was different from yours,” she said, “—that I
didn’t have a feeling I might be gay when I was younger—it meant I must be straight.”
Something opened inside me when she said it. Hearing Kate name something in
herself, what she’d resisted naming during the years we slept together and for years
after, the hurt I’d felt, that I wasn’t even fully aware I still felt, loosened.
if an octopus’s camouflage fails, if it’s seen for what it really is, it resorts to ink, a
thick, black cloud, reimagining protection, what it means to live without ribs at the bot-
tom of the sea. When Kate told me she’d loved me, I felt our story bend, the way the
ribs curve to encompass the lungs, the heart. In one story, we lived in a jar. In another
story, we opened the lid and swam out into the darkness of the ocean.