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

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.

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.

I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.

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

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.

Though the yeti crab’s environment seems inhospitable to us, it is nothing to be pitied. The pressure does not crush the crab, and the darkness does not oppress it. It is exactly suited to the life it leads, however strange or repulsive we might find it. What use is the sun to an eyeless crab? It already has everything it needs.

Feral goldfish are so good at living they have become an ecological menace. Of course, it’s not their fault; goldfish would never have gotten into the river if we hadn’t thought of them as disposable.

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.

Sometimes you don’t need to pull yourself apart to start over. Metamorphosis isn’t always a full-body thing.

What’s left of queerness when it’s not defined by violence endured?

If goldfish are doomed in a bowl, they are unstoppable in a river.

So what if you could do it over? And then again? What body would you choose? Who would you be and who would you love? Would you do it over, and over, and over again?

Trauma is not just a catalyst to regeneration; it is the only catalyst.

I am an organism like any other, we people and pigeons and bacteria experiencing homeostasis on the sidewalk

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.

The truth is that I was asked to leave the Petco, but I told everyone that I was banned.

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.

Few institutions last forever, and bars close all the time. But when a place is your only port, your harbor from the elements, its closure means the loss of something sacred. Of course there will be other bars, other clubs, other parties but will they value you? Will they prioritize your safety and your joy? Will they protect you from the cold?

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. In his essay “Sturgeon Moon,” the fisher John Cronin asks us to consider the sheer magnitude of the animal’s heritage in new units. If we translate two hundred million years into a twenty-four-hour clock, we have taken less than one-tenth of a second in the last minute of the last hour to imperil every single subspecies of sturgeon on the planet. Such is the reach of their history and our power to destroy it. Today, there may be fewer than one hundred Chinese sturgeon capable of returning to the Yangtze each year to breed. Sometime in the next ten to twenty years, scientists predict, the Chinese sturgeon will go extinct in the wild.

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. As

Perhaps if I was not an individual organism but a species, able to prototype myself over millions of years, I might have faith that my body would one day become what it’s meant to be. Maybe I would have elongated limbs to skitter atop water or bony flippers to wedge into sand. I might have a layer of gelatin or retractable spines. Maybe the way I understand myself can accommodate the physical changes that only happen on an evolutionary timescale.

I’m not interested in writing toward some resolution of belonging. Maybe it’s a side effect of coming out twice in adulthood, but I do not want to feel resolved about myself.

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 filled every waking moment with a task; no one could say I hadn’t tried hard enough, worked hard enough, given everything I had to give. At least now I slept easily, short and dreamless nights that ended in a stack of alarms. I could no longer sense who I was, what “happy” might look like, because there was always something I had to think about.

I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.