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

by Sabrina Imbler

A bowl is a tiny, isolated environment starved of oxygen, which means even a slight change in the water chemistry can be lethal. I say this because goldfish pee with abandon. They unleash more ammonia than other aquarium fish, a toxin that would be diluted in a pond or a river but can kill a fish in a bowl. This is why, I would say to the woman, a bowl makes the conditions of living impossible. But when a goldfish manages to survive it, no one thinks of their feat as extraordinary.

One river in southwestern Australia has become overrun with feral goldfish, all descended from a handful of pets someone dumped two decades ago. The balmy conditions of this river, called the Vasse, are goldfish paradise, and here they grow faster than any other population of ferals.

Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste. Salt, waves, hundred-pound sturgeon that could swallow us whole. Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up.

I lasted a week before I opened Tinder. I told myself I was there to see my old classmates, to see who was newly hot, newly gay, or both.

We both had been expected to be daughters but turned out to be something else. We had shed our skins, not like snakes but insects—each of us a nymph outgrowing exoskeleton after exoskeleton, and morphing as we did. We didn’t know which molt would be our last, only that we might not be there yet, both of us rivers moving toward the sea. A few years after that night, they changed their name and pronouns; even later, I changed mine.

This, the scientists understood, was a sign that her eggs had hatched successfully, freeing the mother octopus to die. Most mother octopuses lay a single set of eggs in a lifetime and die after their brood hatches.

When I read about the octopus, I thought about sharing the article with my own mother, but I worried it might be too on the nose.

Gradually, like twilight, the river blushed pink. Soon enough the bodies came, rarely intact but always recognizably human. First, an arm or leg. Later, a torso. At one point, unforgettably, a head. They all wore the clothing of farmers, country people. The dead became routine, grisly apples bobbing downstream. They arrived in batches, indicating that the Japanese had just taken another village.

Conclusion: The proximate cause of death may have been your inability to imagine how to be queer and alone.

You scoured the apps and went on dates with people you hoped would remind you of M, and they never did. All this flaccid yearning felt shamefully maudlin—you knew they were not thinking of you—but you didn’t know how to stop.

I craved intimacy, not just holding someone and being held but the closeness I felt with my queer friends in school and back home. I wanted communities that warmed me until I tingled.

As queer people, we get to choose our families. Vent bacteria, tube worms, and yeti crabs just take it one step further. They choose what nourishes them. They turn away from the sun and toward something more elemental, the inner heat and chemistry of Earth.

While observing young monocle breams in waters off Indonesia, scientists noticed the fish exhibit rather unusual behavior. It always starts with one bream, who, eyes pointing downward, notices a suspicious dimple in the sand.

Then the first fish starts to blow, spitting jets of water toward the crater, whirling up sand and revealing the worm that lies hidden underneath. Breams are incapable of harming the sand striker, as delicate fins and even the most forceful water jet can’t pierce an exoskeleton. But what they can do is expose and warn. Their spurting alerts others nearby to the worm’s stealthy presence in a kind of effervescent whisper network.

This essay will not end with me folding dumplings. It will not end with me eating dim sum with my Chinese grandparents and my white dad, ruminating on how a family like ours wouldn’t have been acceptable a century ago.

In high school, if I had read an essay that ended with me folding dumplings, eating dim sum, experiencing my biracial quota of microaggressions, transfixed by my deliriously unreadable face in a mirror, etc., etc., I would have loved it. In high school and college, I gorged myself on these kinds of essays—the first entries in an empty archive that we and many others had been shut out of. I had become so acclimatized to reading about the personal lives and observations of white men named David that I felt jolts of recognition each time the essayist gestured toward a mixed-race experience we shared. This newfound visibility, this representation, swaddled me.

I had never considered what a mixed-Asian essay that I wrote for other mixed-Asian people might look like. Or, rather, what a mixed-white essay that I wrote for other mixed-white people might look like. And when I tried to think of one, I was afraid I didn’t quite have anything new to say, so I decided it was easier to write about anything, everything, but my race. And yet—this essay is a spoiler in itself—I have never stopped thinking about my mixed race. My race, or rather my preoccupation with what it means and how I should feel about it, is something that may rankle me for the rest of my life.

there is almost no long-term historical record of the salps in any ocean. Few data sets go back more than twenty years, and the ones that do record salps only in these ephemeral explosions of abundance. Scientists only took notice of them when they gathered in such great masses that they made themselves impossible to ignore. Perhaps you would not see salps if they did not form blooms. Many scientists consider salps a nuisance species, because, in swarms, they can take down a fishing net or stop a ship.

Riis on Pride is the opposite of a parade sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. Riis is where I can see everyone I love, or at least everyone I love who is queer and lives in New York, which is a great portion of the people I love.

When I learned that the eastern end of Riis had been a gay haven as early as the ’40s, or even the ’30s, I was stunned by the longevity of the site, and of what we had inherited. I’d imagined it dating back mere decades, not the better part of a century. The people who first frequented the beach were white gay men, of course. Lesbians (white) came in the 1950s, and in the 1960s queer Black and Latinx people staked a claim to the beach too.

We often conflate the cuttlefish’s ability to morph with camouflage, assuming they only use it to hide. Nature documentaries call cuttlefish the masters of disguise. This strikes me as the least interesting thing about the cuttlefish, not just because of the dreariness of the backgrounds they most often blend into but also because camouflage is a body language deployed against predators and others that would harm or devour you. Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self.

This summer, what starts as a longing to please my partner while holding their face in my hands soon morphs into a longing for a cock, not just something I wear but something that could feel, occasionally, like it was a part of me. Until this point, the strap-ons I have worn have belonged not to me but to my partners.

What does immortality mean when you can still be eaten by anything with a mouth? Most immortal jellyfish die in this thoroughly regular way: fortunate enough not to glitch into disease or senescence, unfortunate enough to disintegrate in stomach acid.

Our traditional notions of immortality are so languorous and passive: Jesse Tuck, the everlasting teen, sips from a magic spring and stays seventeen for eternity, just like Edward Cullen from Twilight. I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever.

What’s left of queerness when it’s not defined by violence endured?