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.
