The Octopus Constellation
A Dream Story
To choose another, and to be chosen, is a vow older than the oceans.
Long before the maps of men were inked, sailors spoke of a shape in the eastern sky — sixteen silver arms entwined, gliding through the darkness as though the ocean itself had spilled upward into the night.
They called it the Caerulean Vow, saying it was not born of stars but of two lovers who would not be parted.
Some swore they could still see the currents between them, a shimmer of tide frozen in the heavens.
And on certain nights, when the moon bowed low, it was said their voices could be heard in the waves, whispering a promise no storm could break.
Once, I woke to discover I was a whale — at least in the way other sea creatures might write about it, tangled in erotic poetry.
Events began with a failed kitchen light. I tried replacing the bulb, but found I could only turn the fixture around the bulb.
So, with my behemoth mouth, I held the bulb fast and, with two fins, turned the fixture.
As the screw loosed, the whole apparatus became translucent, then completely invisible.
Try as I might, it slipped my hold. I reached, and it darted from me — now a pulsing, undulating jellyfish.
That’s when I realized: I no longer had hands. Or arms. Only the green, ridged body of a celery stalk.
The realization was less shocking than accepting I had no motor control — only rigid, fibrous existence.
In that moment, I worried for my sibling stalks. Were they still part of the whole? Or had they too been calved away to some dream assignment?
Before I had long to formulate an answer, I felt my balance slip away.
Like a redwood, I tipped and timbered down from the stepladder, which was fashioned from braided cassette ribbon.
Instead of clattering to the tile floor as I expected, I tumbled onto an expansive blue metal roof.
It was a bright royal color and cool to the touch.
Celery-me rolled and tumbled, then began to slide faster and faster. My muscle memory wanted to kick and claw, but there were no nerves to respond.
I slid down the slick blue slope — gravity pulling me toward the yawning drop.
The edge was a knife between life and pain, or worse.
I had known this terror as a human roofer: the lean forward into death, the stubborn grip on survival.
It is a dizzying existence — fighting for purchase when a mistake can deliver potential death.
An invisible voice spoke from somewhere behind me —
“Have a nice life,” it laughed, and a boot shoved me forward.
It was now I noticed that though I was a stalk of celery, I was clad in the armor of a football player.
Beginning to tip into the expanse, my armor dissolved into sand.
Each grain glittered like a diamond as it fell away.
Fear burrowed behind my heart, claws curling tight.
I knew this power: panic.
Fighting against the maw, I lunged straight into the welcoming blue of the roof, but instead of clattering against the rigid surface, it gave softly — then shattered into a lagoon the color of first dreams.
Stunned, I floated — safe from the fall and the panic.
I hung there suspended in the impossible blue-green. Below me, I could see all manner of sea creatures.
A dolphin stopped and welcomed me, offering transport, but I had nowhere to go.
A flounder swam by and advised me to always try to see things from more than one perspective.
An octopus rose to greet me.
She communicated through signs waved with her tentacles.
She signaled an offer: I could not stay here unless I was willing to sacrifice.
She told me the price of breath was her body and mine.
“Do you intend to eat me?” I asked with my celery mind.
Do you accept? she answered with three of her appendages. You have a choice: the dolphin can return you to the shore, she added with two more.
I peeled away my celery skin and found myself — not the human or even the whale — but her kind.
I marveled at my flexibility. The power to control eight limbs simultaneously was incredible.
It would take years to master this form.
But her offer concluded immediately.
We embraced — limbs threading into limbs — until there was no untangling, only the rhythm of tide and pulse.
Her arms wrapped me, squeezed, and found places I did not yet know of.
She was gentle and guiding.
At the crest of our passion, we surrendered.
No panic.
No separation.
We drifted for hours on the current.
Time lost meaning, and I came to know her thoughts as my own.
It was a new ecstasy the human form had never imagined.
Sometime in the night, my mind relaxed and I — we — began to feel buoyant.
Up we floated, to the surface, and then into the black velvet sky.
I watched our ocean grow small until the planet was only a dot as we passed the moon.
‘Where are we going?’ I thought.
I could hear her reply now, no signs required: Home.
And thus, we became the constellation Caerulean Vow.
No one had seen it before.
Rising with the other stars, we became the sixteen-legged cephalopod in the night sky.
Parents would point us out to their children and say,
“There. That’s what it looks like when two creatures choose to stay.”
My vow, to you, dear reader, is Caerulean.
And so, whenever the night is clear and the sea is calm, the Caerulean Vow rises in the east.
Sixteen arms still bound together, they drift across the sky, untouched by time and tide.
Children grow, lovers part, ships are lost and found — but above it all, the vow holds.
For in that place beyond water and breath, two creatures still choose, again and again, to stay.
#essay #memoir #journal #osxs #100daystooffset #writing
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