Fast Fish--or--a Brief History.

It was a slow burn. Steven Spielberg reached into my head and tugged a beaded chain inside my brain when I was four years old. I was watching "Jaws" and my mind lit up so fast and hard that my ears burned. I wasn't afraid of his black eyes or his giant teeth which were bigger than my hands at the time. I kept taking baths and I learned how to swim with the other kids who were scared of being eaten. I learned the scientific name--Carcharadon Carcarius. I learned about the great white shark with the fervor of a mad scientist ten times my age. And then I learned about other sharks.

Two years later my ears still burned. I was six years old and I would still beg my mother to rent a different movie from the "Jaws" series every time she took my big brother and sister to the video store. There were no other movies. My reality was Mr. Quint's crassness and Chief Brody's reluctant heroism. I had thought Hooper was cute. He may have been one of the first celebrities that I was attracted to. Richard Dreyfuss. Strange, I know. But I knew the characters and I loved them. I knew every single line without exception. And there's nothing more precious than hearing a six-year-old little girl say, "Smile, you son of a bitch!" at family gatherings. I'm sure I had no idea what I was saying.

When I was ten I was still actively immersed in an obsessive world of shark-mania. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I participated in the Swim for Diabetes event every year and swam 200 laps each time so I could obtain a free pass to Sea World of Aurora. That Sea World is closed now but while it was here, I anxiously awaited its spring opening every year.

I liked boys but I wasn't the kind of girl who needed to like boys. I didn't matter. I was unattractive and awkward and I cared too much about strange things like sharks so that I scared most of the boys my age away. Older men thought it was cute that I was so clever and precocious. So I developed an interest in them as well but without the same enthusiasm that I gave to my finned friends of the sea.

It was during those years that I could feel most like myself in this one particular place. Each summer I would take trips to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo with my family or with my cousins or with the boys next door and their mother. And each time I would look forward to the sweaty climb up the twisted wooden ramps that led to the Primate, Cat, and Aquatic Building at the zoo's highest point, and my favorite place on Earth. I would start slowly, then begin to skip, and then I would sprint up in the shade of the towering trees, feeling my young calves burn while my hands flailed around in nervous anticipation. I was on my way to the shark building.

I always waited to see the sharks. I'd save them for last. And each time I would plop down on the carpeted stairs to catch my breath and watch them swim around their deep, circular tank in the green glow of the saltwater. The tank was special, but nothing too spectacular. The walls were brown and ancient-looking and there wasn't a whole lot of room to swim, compared to other tanks I'd seen. Still, this place was sacred. I was attracted to it, enamored even.

There was a huge ugly purple grouper, bigger than me for most of my youth. And there were the sharks. Always two blacktip reef sharks, smooth and fierce-looking with intense, wide white eyes and catlike black slits. The whitetip reef shark was the king of the tank, long and fast, prone to napping on the bottom and then being stirred by the movement of the large nurse shark, a docile, monk-like bottom-feeder. There was always that stout-looking horn shark with his beady starless eyes and rounded fins.

Sometimes I would step forward and lean against the glass, trying to think myself into the tank, tracing their straight and sleek, wakeless paths with my fingers. I saw the water spiraling steadily above them and dreamed of diving in. Sometimes to get a closer look I would kneel beside the tank and peer at them through one or all of the four portholes, about a foot and a half in diameter, cut in the sides for viewing from different angles.

During my adolescence I started feeling lonely. At times I was depressed. I gained weight, I grew more awkward and uncomfortable in my own skin. And while the other girls were getting their first kisses and more, I felt unworthy of such affection. And I felt unlikely too. It was unlikely that I would be kissed or hugged or accepted by the boys my age.

So I sat, alone, and dreamed in front of the shark tank, of a boy who might come up to me right there and kiss me. In front of the blacktips, the whitetip, the nurse shark, the horn shark. He'd pull me close and I'd feel safe. I wasn't afraid of the sharks, of course, but he'd still protect me.

I came close a few years ago. I was in love with my best friend and I had an opportunity. We were standing there, stupidly, parallel. And I didn't kiss him. I feared that the fantasy had built up dangerously in my mind and that I would be disappointed. So much depended on this kiss because it would be our first. So I waited. I waited for another two years.

I often dreamed after that day that I was being proposed to in front of the sharks. I dreamed that a faceless lover of mine was diving with me at the bottom, stroking the nurse shark. I dreamed that this same lover might actually want to stroke me. The fantasies grew more lascivious and seemed less attainable.

Could I really find a man who would love me and want to touch me and want to kiss me and still know about this bizarre obsession that grew in my mind from childhood? Would he know to hold me in front of the shark tank?

And he did.

He let me wait a little longer, even. We walked around the building, casually observing the other lesser animals. The rising tension within me bubbled and burned within my ears. I felt varied degrees of frustration as we took circuitous routes around my shark tank. There were moments when I could see it from the corner of my eye but I averted my gaze. It was a game. A sexy, quiet little game within me. And it felt good to share with this man--this perfect, indescribably wonderful man.

We finally approached the sharks and I was struck by how changeless the tank seemed. There was another female blacktip shark. The grouper's once bright purple color was faded. But he was just as large--maybe larger, because usually these things seem bigger when you're younger, but he looked the same to me. My lover asked me to tell him about the sharks and I did. I don't remember what I said. I was hypnotized again by the glow of the tank, the serenity that overtook my body. I was reconnecting. I was dreaming a little too.

When he grabbed my hand and led me around the corner, my heart sank. I feared that I wouldn't get my kiss. I couldn't understand why he hadn't done it. My feet felt heavy and I was scared until I had the nerve to ask him where he was taking me. He thought there were more sharks. I wish there were, dear, but there weren't.

I led him back to the other side of the tank to look through the portholes and he knelt down beside me to peer into the clear green water. I knelt down and saw the nurse shark and the horn shark and the whitetip reef shark. I projected myself along with him into the water. I felt light. I felt as if I was floating until I became aware again of the weight I was placing on the toes of my tennis shoes. I turned to see him looking at me and I felt instantly as if the ground beneath me dissolved--as if the intensity of his gaze were suspending me over a dangerous abyss beneath my feet. We were breathing underwater. And then he kissed me. And I felt everything. I had eight senses.

After the kiss we stared at each other and I felt faint. I imagine that this is what it might feel like to time-travel or to fall suddenly in an anti-gravity chamber at the pull of a lever, or to break the sound barrier. I did not know where I was in relation to the universe anymore. Because this was a new universe. It consumed me. It wasn't until two days later that I wondered if the kids on the other side of the tank could see us through the glass of the portholes on the opposite side.

I don't know what I did to deserve this. I sustained that dream for so long. I thought it might have gone the way of everything else from childhood--I would never be a marine biologist, Sea World closed, I stopped talking to the boys next door. This one lingered though.

And it will linger in my memory. The best kiss of my life. The only lasting dream of mine that finally found fruition. I'm still glowing. It's as though the green water is surrounding me, glistening and wetting my eyes so that I must blink to rid them of the tears, to make sure that I am not merely dreaming once again. When I close my eyes at night the inside of my eyelids remind me to keep my waking reverie alive. It's real, they say. It's real. It's real.

Later in the evening he nibbled on my neck and I woke up this morning with the mark that he left. I smiled at myself in the mirror, imagining the scar story I'd tell to Quint and Brody and Hooper in the belly of the Orca. I hummed "Show Me the Way to Go Home" as I brushed my teeth, smirking all the while.