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

by Sabrina Imbler

What does the light want? More of its kind? Yes. Yes and a wish to disturb the dark. —from Kimiko Hahn, Resplendent Slug

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.

When she went in for a checkup, all 40 extra pounds plus me, her doctor told her to stop eating all that Chinese food. “That doctor was a bitch,” she said.

Narratively speaking, motherhood may seem to be the climax of the female octopus’s life, the grand finale. It is the last thing she does before she dies. Male octopuses die soon after mating—sex a climax in every sense of the word—but female octopuses live long enough to brood the eggs. It is an extension of life, but also of labor. This arrangement, evolutionarily speaking, seems to me a raw deal.

I wonder how those octopuses like the taste of themselves, their first meal after so many months of starvation. Do they savor it?

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

I closed my eyes and imagined myself as my mother, my stomach my mother’s stomach, back when she was young and tasted whatever she desired, back when she feasted.

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.

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

The proximate cause of death may be falling in love with the idea of a person, or the idea of a relationship.

What use is the sun to an eyeless crab? It already has everything it needs.

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.

IF YOU TOUCH A WOMAN AGAINST HER WILL IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT, WE WILL LITERALLY RUIN YOUR LIFE.

This is to say that individual identity is confusing for a salp, creatures for whom the notion of selfhood exists in the plural. For a salp, home is the rest of its salp.

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.

But in the wild, flamboyant cuttlefish are rarely flamboyant, unless they’re scared or horny.

The flamboyant cuttlefish is only flamboyant around bright lights and looming shadows because it is startled, flushed, endangered.

So what if you could do it over? And then again? What body would you choose? Who would you be and who would you love? Would you do it over, and over, and over again?

Trauma is not just a catalyst to regeneration; it is the only catalyst.

So I have to ask you again. How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?