How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up. Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you’re a hundred times bigger than you once were. A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.

These giant fish survived the asteroid and the Ice Age and so much more only to be wiped out by cosmically puny obstacles: our dams, our boats, our chemicals, our taste for caviar.

Few institutions last forever, and bars close all the time. But when a place is your only port, your harbor from the elements, its closure means the loss of something sacred. Of course there will be other bars, other clubs, other parties, but will they value you? Will they prioritize your safety and your joy? Will they protect you from the cold?

But life always finds a place to begin anew, and communities in need will always find one another and invent new ways to glitter, together, in the dark.

Maybe complaining to someone who gets it is one of the purest comforts on Earth.

It feels like pride, sure, but it also feels like liberation.

Now is the best day of our lives, until we come back.

When you are not fleeing, what will you become?

Each time I learn to protect myself now, I protect myself then. I make space for new versions of myself in the future. A forever expansion and re-creation of my own life.