Giant Squid

Giant Squid, by Patricia Meyer

He was supposed to have been a ship passing in the night, a simple metaphor, a one-night stand, a wave to ride, nothing more. That was last month, the night I met him. But something, maybe the churning sex, or the way he made my body swell, or his starry intellect, or his lighthouse eyes, made me want more, to dock my boat humbly at his port and ask for a second moonlight ride.

Seconds on sex - firsts on friendship. For me getting into a man’s bed is easy, in his head and you better have your own heavy-duty submersible. Usually, if you succeed, you dive in like Jacques Cousteau hoping to find something, anything actually, but usually find only beer bottles and barnacles. Once in a great while there is a treasure chest of silent skeletons waiting to be taken out, shined up and tinkered with. A verbal tide lapping at pleasure’s bulkhead - the best foreplay ever.

Myself, I wear my skeleton on the outside, an exoskeleton, protection from my perceptions and expectations of male sharks. Men who never stop swimming through a sea of skirts for fear they might stop breathing, self absorbed, ego driven, say one thing mean another, bottom feeders, a species requiring extreme caution, only to swim with at one’s own risky pheromone driven pleasure.

Then, like giant squid, there are the other men, said to exist but rarely discovered. These men open doors, pull out chairs, know how to lead a woman onto the dance floor with a hand placed gingerly on the small of her spine, they have manicured nails, and fresh crisp shirts, and love bubble baths and chocolate, and take time to kiss fingers and toes. They like to read to you, and listen to thunder under the covers and brush your hair while you sleep. The illusive mystery men that know what women want. And like the giant squid, these men are said to be mythically extinct in today’s culture. Perhaps more dangerous than their finned brothers, these men swim with eight elegant arms extended, and skirts bob about them like jelly fish in a sea of purple water, and both catches desire and fear the sting of getting just a tad too close, caught in a net, and chopped up for bait.

As all lighthouses sit before dangerous shores, he later told me, maybe warned me, of his harbors, divulging that, like Odysseus, he bids to a suite of sirens. I was not surprised, having journeyed through his delicate bedside Odyssey. The knowledge did nothing but turn me on, making him all the more an enchanting excursion.

Typically, I would catch my fat fish, pry the hook from his gaping mouth and throw my prize back before he had a chance to wiggle off my line. Yet the weight and the play in the water, this time, felt oddly more a challenge and I swam my line with caution.

I did not know I was floating in a mystical fog, swimming with the intricate squid’s tentacles wrapped about me. It reminds me of paranormal investigators who spend an eternity searching for and investigating evidence to find that illusive something, which they themselves hope but truly doubt exists. Then presto, a full-fledged apparition bursts on the scene, and they can’t believe their eyes or instruments, they reason this surely is a malfunction or an illusion!

So I went on skeptically questioning my findings, examining moments and emotions under a microscopic lens, testing my equipment, squeezing the source, diving in exploration and explanation, but I could not believe that the cool breeze might be fondling me from a spiritual side, fathom that the Giant Squid truly held me in its multi-faceted grasp, or trust that a tempting treasure could still exist in that dark seedy sea of creatures. I picked up an oyster from the ocean floor recently, and the pearl within whispered to me, “You Should.”