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

by Sabrina Imbler

It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to die but that ceasing to exist (and being reverently mourned) felt more tangible to me than what I had been told I should want.

What does it mean to survive in the wild? You can’t do it without going wild yourself. We are all capable of reverting to a wilder state. The wild may sentence a cat or a dog to a starved life or early death. But for a goldfish, the wild promises abundance. Release a goldfish, and it will never look back. Nothing fully lives in a bowl; it only learns to survive it.

I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself.

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.

I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.

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.

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.

Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong.

why must fields of science have fathers?—

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy.

The scientific name for cuttlefish is Sepia, and the cuttlefish gave the color its name, not the other way around. The ancient Greeks used cuttlefish ink to write with, stabbing their nibs in dead cuttlefish’s ink sacs, producing the distinctive, almost translucent brown hue. Sepia has come to describe a color rather than a substance, and it is a color associated with the past, antique films and photographs all beige and discolored. When a cuttlefish’s ink is taken from its body, the resulting drawing or letter will always appear vintage and outdated, no matter how freshly drawn.