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

by Sabrina Imbler

I knew this because I tracked it every day, sneaking into her bathroom to step onto her digital scale. I would take off all my clothes and drop them in a heap beside the scale. I would close my eyes as the numbers scrambled. I think I kept them closed longer than I needed to, afraid to leave this unknowing. Sometimes, when the number disappointed, as it often did, I would weigh myself again, futilely repositioning my feet as if this could shuffle the mass of my body. But the scale did not change.

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.

No, I am not writing to blame these men, but I also am not excusing them by casting their behavior as something instilled in them by systems beyond their control. 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.

It is, in other words, the closest thing I can imagine to living alongside a ghost.