Dear Lobster,
I am sorry. Not for eating you, for your meat was like butter and nuts and had a richness that didn’t seem like it should belong to the sea. It went down most agreeably.
But I am sorry for thinking of you as my enemy, which I had to do in order to feel all right about picking you from the tank and sending you to meet your maker. I confess that, as I watched you bat at the air for your freedom, I felt as though you should have it. But I’m glad you didn’t.
And because I thought of you as my enemy, I had to exact a certain price from you. I had to pretend you had done something awful, maybe to my mother. I imagined you calling her a vacuum cleaner—did no one have the heart to tell you that Lobsterese is really just Canadian English?—and I had a vengeance that could only be satisfied by taking off the pincer of your claw and digging into your body with it for your meat. And so I used it, its thin sharp point finding its way into your knuckles, into your bends and corners. I ate wildly, your legs sticking out of my mouth, my head flying about. I think I might have looked like a pom-pom.
But, as I slowed down to separate your meat from your gills, I came to understand what I was really doing. I had nothing against you. And as I plucked off your legs one by one and sucked on them for juice, as I dug with the curved tip of your claw to find the hidden tiny pockets of meat in your carapace (you didn’t mean to hide them from me, did you?), I found that what I was doing was patient, satisfied, loving. You might not have realized it, but that’s what it was. Loving.
Yours forever,
Francis
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