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You may think goldfish live for just a year, maybe two. But they can actually live much longer. Twenty years, if they’re lucky. Goldfish can survive a few years in a bowl because they are almost supernaturally hardy, capable of weathering conditions that would quickly kill most other fish.
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.
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.
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.
As they huddled in a deserted temple, her mother spoke to her children in whispers. “If we are discovered by enemy soldiers,” her mother said, “I will kill you first, I will kill you before the soldiers can.”
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.
I knew I had seen a whale, so it must have looked like one.
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.
“What are you?” is an act of taxonomy, even if the asker does not realize it.
I have lived my life dogged by The Question.
I am lucky that The Question is the most common vector of racism I encounter. It establishes me as something inscrutable—a strange amoeba in a petri dish, never seen before in this pond.
As the years pass, I have become convinced that the people asking me The Question are looking not for an answer but for confirmation. I know this because when I do tell these people “what” I am, some of them argue with me.
whenever I meet a mixed person who looks something like me, I want to ask them The Question. I want to know what kind of Asian they are. I want to know how their parents met. I want to know what words they use to identify themselves. I want to know how close or distanced they feel to their own whiteness. I want to ask them the questions I don’t want strangers to ask me. In other words, I am also the asshat.
I decided to email a park ranger named Dave—supporting my ongoing theory that all park rangers are named Dave—
So there is almost no long-term historical record of the salps in any ocean. Few data sets go back more than twenty years, and the ones that do record salps only in these ephemeral explosions of abundance. Scientists only took notice of them when they gathered in such great masses that they made themselves impossible to ignore. Perhaps you would not see salps if they did not form blooms.
We are not forever. Riis may outlast us, but it will eventually disappear too, swallowed up by rising seas. But for now we are here. Now is the best day of our lives, until we come back. Now we soak up all this love until it rolls down our backs in salt and we jump, screaming, into the water. Right now we are so in love with one another that we need to cool down, to submerge until everything disappears so that when we surface and open our eyes, we are newly amazed. That it is all still here. That we are all still here.
We queer beachgoers come and go, but the abandoned children’s tuberculosis hospital will always greet us when we return.
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.
Trauma is not just a catalyst to regeneration; it is the only catalyst.
