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

by Sabrina Imbler

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.

But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. 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.

How I couldn’t believe how ridiculous and deeply gay it was that we spent most of a night on a bed petting a cat, unsure if the other person was into it. So I said, “I can’t believe it,” over and over and they said, “I can’t believe it,” back. And then I left, and we let each other go.

“You’re lucky—you don’t have to lose much,” she told me, her teeth flashing. 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.

“I would give anything to be anorexic,” she sighed, taking her burrito out of the cafeteria microwave. “But I just don’t have the discipline.” I felt a pang of agreement, or maybe it was hunger.

Narratively speaking, motherhood may seem to be the climax of the female octopus’s life, the grand finale. It is the last thing she does before she dies. Male octopuses die soon after mating—sex a climax in every sense of the word—but female octopuses live long enough to brood the eggs. It is an extension of life, but also of labor. This arrangement, evolutionarily speaking, seems to me a raw deal.

Sometime in college, when I began to wobble toward “better,” I saw that my mother was not. She still occasionally called herself a fat pig. But I had always been afraid to talk about it with her. How can you stage an intervention for your starving mother, especially when you worry you might still want to starve yourself?

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.

Sometimes it feels like she is returning to China, and I wonder if she is also returning to her memories. I am afraid to upset or strain the tether she holds to the present, to America, to the only part of her life where I exist.

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

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.

I told this story because for a long time it seemed the most exciting thing that had happened to me, and I wanted to have an exciting life, and if I convinced myself it was a fun night, then eventually I would believe it.

Though prey can be caught off guard, can be surprised, can even be ambushed, prey is never truly unsuspecting. It has evolved the blueprint of its body in response to, or in anticipation of, trauma.

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.

This is the work we inherit as creatures with a complex brain, which comes with inexplicable joys, like love and sex and making out in cars, but also the duty of empathy, of understanding what it means when someone is stumbling.

I was so nervous my words tumbled out of me like marbles. I am sure what I said was incomprehensible, mistaking oversharing for flirting, but I marveled at the space they held for me, and how they listened.

Looking back, I realize I had written the essay not just for a white editor but also for a white audience. Like a dutiful little trash compactor, I had digested my messy heap of an identity into a manageable lesson for people who were not like me. I had never considered what a mixed-Asian essay that I wrote for other mixed-Asian people might look like. Or, rather, what a mixed-white essay that I wrote for other mixed-white people might look like.

I don’t fault myself for this obsession; if a person is asked “What are you?” often enough, they may become hell-bent on finding an answer.

“What are you?” is an act of taxonomy, even if the asker does not realize it. It is the question the scientists asked of my hybrid butterflyfish. The question my SAT forms asked of me before I opened my test booklet to write an essay about whether people should accept unfairness as a condition of becoming an adult. The question strangers asked me in the malls of my childhood, peering over my bowl cut to see if a legible pair of parents might suddenly appear. I have lived my life dogged by The Question.

Maybe these moments teach me that this joy does not come from being around people who look like you but from people who are irritated in the same ways. Maybe home is the people who hear your rants and nod, because they know. Maybe complaining to someone who gets it is one of the purest comforts on Earth. Maybe it is less about our shared backgrounds than it is about our shared irritations, obsessions, grievances, fears, resentments. We are still dissecting ourselves and how we came to be, but now we are the ones asking the questions.

Someone scaled the hospital and painted at the top of one tower QUEER TRANS POWER in marshmallowy all-caps letters, a reminder of the urgency of our softness.