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

by Sabrina Imbler

I remember I spent late nights on AIM trying to talk my friend out of wanting to die.

Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us.

knew I was anthropomorphizing, and yet I couldn’t imagine how a creature with a consciousness would starve for four and a half years without something like hope. What I mean to say is: I wanted to know if she ever regretted it.

I knew I would never be as skinny as my mother’s worst version of herself.

I felt both relieved and, unexpectedly, distressed. I hadn’t realized a small part of me was hoping the nutritionist would tell me that, actually, I was fine. That, actually, I could just exist in my current body, and the real work was to love it.

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. She wanted me to be skinny so things would be easier. White, so things would be easier. Straight, so things would be easy, easy, easy.

it is far easier to die than it is to live.

Before their fins broke the surface of the water on the other side, the fish found their soft, plump bodies transformed into something slithering, and the slick mucus of their scales hardened into jeweled pebbles of skin. That is to say, they became dragons.

So the sturgeon are dying, in lakes and rivers and oceans all over the world. 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.

Scientists have observed this final stage in a whale bone spotted in abyssal plains nearly three miles deep, somewhere between Hawai‘i and Mexico.

The bone had become glazed with manganese, an element that precipitates out of seawater over thousands of years, suggesting the whale sank more than ten thousand years ago.

Wintertime in the Pacific Northwest felt subterranean: dark, frozen, eternally wet.