For the Creatures That Glow

Inside a canvas tent under a fingernail moon, I watch K from my rickety chair on the perimeter, hypnotized. She moves with abandon and authority in the soft glow of the bistro lights, tracing the shapes of coded letters with her hips. Her long blonde hair swings and sways and for a split second I worry she can sense my eyes on her, but it’s clear she is somewhere else.

A voice just beyond K beckons. "You're welcome to dance with us. No pressure."

Normally I’m the kind of person who would stay bolted to my seat, declining with a taut smile. But watching K stirs something in me. Fuck it, I'll dance.

I join five or so women circled around a small wooden trunk as the bluetooth speaker in the center plays a sultry song. Nearby, other women sit in pairs on couches deep in conversation. We’ve all come to this retreat at the base of the Bighorn Mountains looking for something. Riding horses, writing poems, gathering around campfires were all on the itinerary to help us find it. But this luminous circle in the dark, all tumble and sway, took shape all on its own.

As I look around the circle it hits me: nobody wants anything from me—a realization that makes me feel both naked and unencumbered, like leaving the house without a purse. Without the burden of expectant eyes, my body slips free, remembers something.

• • •

Growing up I loved ballet more than I had any right to. With my flat feet and full thighs it sure as hell did not love me back, but that didn't stop me from making it my whole personality, or falling asleep to the sounds of my Nutcracker CD year-round. I’d doze off each night somewhere around the Waltz of the Snowflakes to visions of myself taking center stage under hot lights.

It's hard to imagine a girl feeling liberated inside such an unforgiving form. I can't really explain it, except to say that for me ballet wasn’t so much a thing I did but a place I went.

Even in classrooms packed with other girls in black leotards and slicked-back buns, once the piano started it was just me and my technique: a silent negotiation between mind and muscle. Rotating and extending, resisting and unfolding, contracting and springing to create just the right shape. I’ve yet to find anything else that makes me feel so acutely surgical and soft at the same time, but I may never stop chasing the thrill of the contradiction. Part machine, part bird.

Many of earth’s creatures radiate light, either by creating it themselves through bioluminescence or absorbing and re-emitting it at different wavelengths through biofluorescence. Scientists have long known about this phenomenon in the deep ocean, but until recently, few have studied it in birds.

A study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal earlier this year looked at biofluorescence in birds-of-paradise, which live almost exclusively in remote tropical forests of Papua New Guinea and nearby islands.

Even without the ability to glow, birds-of-paradise are already showstoppers. With their elaborate mating dances and brightly colored plumage, head fans and breast shields and trailing tail feathers that float like streamers, they’ve earned a reputation as some of the most theatrical birds.

But then, when you add in this new luminous party trick—and knowing that birds can see whole spectrums of color the human eye can’t—suddenly these beauties are set ablaze against the dark jungle green. Anything to put on a show.

As both a young dancer and an only child, my appetite for the spotlight was ravenous. I was happy to compete for it, though I also relished the times I didn’t have to—when I was the only kid in the room for grown-ups to dote on, or when being both very short and a strong turner earned me a front-and-center spot in dance team formations. When Nutcracker auditions rolled around each year, I lunged for those coveted soloist roles. The bigger the better.

Jump cut to my thirties, and my default role has become that of wallflower. The kind that unfurls only once the crowds have thinned and the lights are low, all too ready to yield to anyone vying for center stage.

When did I first stop fighting for my share of the light? When did I stop craving eyes on me?

• • •

It was early spring 2003 and my parents had driven me to Costa Mesa to audition for Boston Ballet’s summer intensive program. With a paper number affixed to my leotard and my heart in my throat, we began with a typical barre sequence before moving to center floor for adagio where we stood in silent rows awaiting direction.

That’s when it happened. Instead of cuing the pianist, the judges stood from their table against the mirror and picked up their clipboards, and silently moved toward us.

A man approached me, asked me quietly to stand in fifth position then tendu my foot out to the side. He squatted to be eye-level with my calves, squinted as he scrutinized my arches, my knees, my hips, and scribbled little notes. I never saw my scoresheet but I may as well have.

It was my first memory of feeling eyes on my body and wanting to disappear.

Most of the earth’s bioluminescent creatures are found in the deep ocean. In the absence of light, around 75 percent of deep-sea creatures have adapted to make their own.

Some use their bioluminescence to command attention—like the Bermuda fireworms that flock to the ocean’s surface after a full moon and emit their blue-green mating signal, or the angler fish who suspends her fiery orb in the deep dark to seduce both mates and prey.

Others like the hatchetfish use their light to disappear—sending light downward from their bellies to match the faint light that filters down from the ocean’s surface, disguising their shadows and rendering them invisible to predators below.

In both cases, luminous creatures of all stripes have learned to wield their glow to survive.

As a teenager my body bloomed in all the ways ballerinas weren't supposed to. Once in the grocery store when I was 13 wearing my favorite shimmery, stretchy black jazz pants I remember my mom hissing at a man in front of the dairy case for the way his eyes lingered. He’d been leering in plain sight, a silent language I didn't yet register while my mom had a lifetime of training.

It was then I began to understand my body had been broadcasting signals without my permission, for who knows how long. Signals that could be willfully misconstrued as gleaming invitations. Bait.

Bioluminescence can also be used as a tool for self protection. A vampire squid that feels threatened will release a cloud of glowing liquid to cloak and confuse its attacker while it makes an escape. Brittle stars and certain kinds of sea cucumber will break off parts of their own bodies, use them as shimmering diversions while the rest of them crawls away in the dark.

This strategy has a name: self-amputation. And even for creatures that can regenerate these body parts, a temporary loss still comes at a price. Like so many young women I learned to self-amputate, to abandon my body while some shiny appendage stayed behind to feign enthusiasm and perform the part of easygoing, agreeable girl.

There was one night my much older then-boyfriend brought me to a club—the kind with low lights and a bar, but also a thick velvet curtain and a backroom. I’d agreed to go only because I assumed it was safer to hang queasy on his arm than send him off alone. I wore an ivory lace mini dress, with a shape I hoped might disguise my hips and a sweet black bow tied beneath the bust. I paired it with thick black tights and the kind of too-tall black platform heels only a new college graduate would have in her closet. In the dark of the bar I glowed, a legless figurine. Eager to detach at the waist and scuttle far, far away.

Years later, after I’d left that relationship and the severed parts of me had begun grow back, I told
myself I was done staying in situations that needed me to discard parts of myself just to endure them.

• • •

For a small sliver of girlhood, being in the spotlight was all upside. But here on the other side of adolescence, where women must exist as both people and objects, the line that separates visibility from threat somehow feels much thinner.

An unintended consequence of luminescence is that it can also attract the attention of predators. Those same brilliant tailfeathers designed to dazzle can also catch the eye of hungry hawks and snakes, and hinder a quick escape. So long as there are predators, too much attention becomes a liability.

I think of all the ways I've clipped my own wings and called it self-preservation. Each time I tell myself the same story: that this subdued version of me who hangs back and deflects attention is just my nature. But is it? Would chatty, twirly five-year-old Michelle see herself in this person who swears she’s content being mostly invisible?

I suspect this gnawing question explains why I can suddenly, silently become the harshest judge I know when I’m around the kinds of people who brazenly assert themselves without apology—who dare to seek and enjoy attention.

Somewhere in the process of retreating from the light, I lost my connection to dancing too. Occasionally I’ll still find myself alone in the kitchen late at night, and my fingertips instinctively find the edge of the kitchen island for balance as I dégagé in the dark. A dancer still, but only when no one is watching.

When we picture bioluminescence in the ocean, creatures like the anglerfish with her cage of teeth and protruding spine like a fishing pole might steal our attention. But let’s not overlook the
single-celled dinoflagellates that also dwell in the deep sea.

These microscopic phytoplankton glow a brilliant blue-green when brushed or agitated, giving the water around them a fluorescent twinkle. But the real spectacle occurs when they find each other, congregating in huge numbers and lighting up whole lagoons.

These bioluminescent bays are some of the earth’s rarest and most delicate ecosystems, needing just the right conditions to thrive: warm, still water, windless weather, shelter from the turbulence of the sea. Scientists believe their glow is a form of protection against predators. That when they glow together, they create a kind of collective safety.

Something healed in me that night we congregated and danced in our tent under the moon, a rare sanctuary where it was safe to let the whole of ourselves beam and luminesce without any of the usual hypervigilance. I credit being in the company of those women, lit ablaze by some unseeable hand in the water and glowing together as if none of us had ever forgotten how.

It’s a holy thing to be held like that, in a gaze that presents no threat. To be not watched, but witnessed. To bear witness, too. In a flash I caught a glimpse of the little girl who never wanted
to disappear, who twirled and twirled and insisted you not look away.

• • •

After our dance party disperses, I bump into J on my walk to the outdoor sinks. We stand together beneath winking stars, the two of us wrapped in blankets holding our toothbrushes. I tell her I didn't know how badly I needed to move like that. She tells me getting to watch me dance was one of the highlights of her week. And I believe her.