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 is nearly impossible to hurt yourself while living in a fish’s equivalent of a padded cell:

Maybe there is something universal about wanting to get out.

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.

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.

It seems a shame that an animal able to sense so much of the world occupies it so briefly,

I realize now that my mother’s wish for me to be thin was, in its way, an act of love.

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.

If we translate two hundred million years into a twenty-four-hour clock, we have taken less than one-tenth of a second in the last minute of the last hour to imperil every single subspecies of sturgeon on the planet.

Years later, after my grandmother had grown, she still woke up in the middle of the night, remembering the time her mother promised to kill her. It took her years to understand it was a promise filled with love.

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

I wanted communities that warmed me until I tingled.

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

I wasn’t even hoping for a particular answer; I simply wanted someone to plot my experience on a grid, to tell me if it was valid to feel this way or if I just needed to get over it.

Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center

I was fine until they found me, and then I wasn’t.

Maybe home is the people who hear your rants and nod, because they know.

The dream quiets whenever I shave my head again. For some time, this is enough, until it’s not.

and I begin to wonder how much I have changed my body for me and how much I’ve changed it for others.

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.

So I dub this essay a pseudomorph, a gibbous moon, a silhouette in ink of the person I am now and whom I may no longer resemble in the future.

What does immortality mean when you can still be eaten by anything with a mouth?

when the immortal jellyfish’s body begins to fail, it ages backwards. Its ailing body sinks to the seafloor or some hard surface and rearranges itself into a silky lump, looking like an egg, or a cell, primordial, all potential. It seals itself in an envelope of chitin and shuffles around the meaning of its cells. And then it sprouts into a polyp and grows, into not one individual jellyfish but many clones. So the single damaged jellyfish becomes a host of younger, possible selves, each with the same power to regenerate.

how she wanted me to grow out my hair, how I wanted her to grow out her beard. Maybe this should have signified to us that we wanted to switch. Maybe we were in love from the other sides of the looking glass.

I wonder if something spiritual can grow in place of something physical. What happens to the whole with a part removed?

I had a trans childhood because it was mine and it’s not over.

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.

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

If you do not give the jellyfish more than it can handle, it will not begin to regrow. If there is not enough cesium chloride in the petri dish, if there are not enough needles or there is too little heat, the jellyfish will remain adult, alive. So you have to ensure there is enough stress, enough trauma.

Today, it makes me so sad to think about how much more I could have loved myself, and how much sooner.…