Late-afternoon sun speckled the surface of the water. I studied my arm under the waves, and the lattice that the light left behind on the water. It was several summers ago, and I was off the coast of South Carolina, but it could have been any beach, at any time. 

It was almost my turn to use the paddle board after my aunt got tired of it. I was floating in the water, treading. Overwhelmed by the sun’s heat, I dunked myself underwater, opening my eyes once I was all the way under, admiring the kaleidoscope of the sun filtering through the water, not caring that my eyes stung. I’d stay under for as long as I could and emerge gasping for breath, tossed by the waves, disheveled, only to do it again. It was right after one of these returns to the surface that I raised my hand, hoping to wave to my aunt as she turned back to paddle towards me, and noticed something suctioned to my arm.

For several seconds I was shocked, frozen except for my gasps. I flailed my arms wildly, windmilling, trying to free myself while not looking whatever it was in the eye, but I could still feel its weight on my body. Suddenly the world was nothing but the water—too much of it—and the oppressive sun and this thing shattering any illusions I’d had about the kind of day I was to have, about the imaginary wall between the natural world and me.

The ocean’s constituents, even its friendliest, scared me—it made me shiver to think about a whole world underwater, shrouded in darkness, full of shadowy creatures of unknown intent. I usually keep my fears at bay through rote compartmentalization; the ocean I spent time in was a sunshiny wave pool, populated with friendly dolphins and flounders. The ocean I tried not to think about housed my worst fears—unexpected confrontations, being pulled away from my familiar life to somewhere unknown and inescapable, but somehow inevitable. It’s the same impulse that makes me throw my phone across the room after a risky text and what made me avoid checking my college decisions for days after they arrived. There are some things I’ve never wanted to know. 

But now, compartmentalization had failed me.

I kept swatting. The monster, which I only realized was a fish after the fact, was nearly the length of my forearm. When I finally turned my head and faced it, the first thing I saw was one of its eyes—unblinking, huge, as obvious and uncomplicated as a plastic googly eye. This moment of contact seemed to give me strength. With one last desperate slap, I threw the fish back into the water and scrambled away. 

Some moments stick with you much longer than they seem like they should. Hours after I ran out of the ocean, wrapped myself in the plushest towel I could find, and planted myself on the sunny sidewalk, I could still feel the fish on my arm, the way its scales had felt against my palm as I had struggled to free myself. 

I searched for “remora fish” on my phone—I had never heard of them, but one of my cousins had said that that’s probably what had grabbed onto me. 

The search results for remora fish are, naturally, straightforward. They contain encyclopedia entries and factual Youtube videos introducing this common fish variety; there are no harrowing first-hand accounts, at least not on the first page of results. The only answers to the question “What should you do if a remora attaches itself to you?” seemed to be “If you were wearing a wetsuit, you will be fine.” 

But what if you weren’t? I thought anxiously. I, of course, was fine, but it left me wondering where the stories like mine were, the ones characterized by confusion, the ones lacking categorization and calm collectedness. 

I learned what remoras usually grab onto: sharks, wales, dolphins, sea turtles, wayward divers. Suddenly I was struck by phantom fears of what could have happened; had there been a shark somewhere around me? My brain ached for a more theoretical fear, something abstract to latch on to—here it was. 

I also learned that remoras must have water running through their gills at all times to breathe— an evolutionary weakness; they had to give things up in return for their ability to rely on the larger members of the ocean world. I hadn’t considered the shared breathlessness of the moment.

My biggest takeaway from my research wasn’t scientific, at least not overtly. It was that there was no logical translation between the orderly descriptions I was reading online and what it had felt like to be in the water, confronted with something I didn’t understand. I was desperate to reshape the memory, to imagine what it would have been like if I had understood what was going on—would I have felt the same panic if I’d been armed with knowledge?

The connection between what I had experienced and reality only seemed to grow more tenuous as I studied photos of remoras online. In pictures, they were so solid, almost plasticlike, and lacking in grace. Remoras attach to their hosts using a modified dorsal fin, like what sharks have, a remarkable feature which develops into its final form as the fish grow into adulthood. Although this suction tool is evolutionarily fascinating and complex, it’s deceptively simple–like a cartoon brain–and I felt, after a few minutes pouring over images of remoras, that I could accurately describe what they looked like without so much as a glance back at my reference material. And yet this cartoon of an animal had made me lose myself, even if only for a moment. Floating in the ocean, I couldn’t mock the remora’s elementary construction from a distance; instead, it overwhelmed me. Context is everything. 

Upon researching remoras more, I learned that they were once believed to be able to slow or stop ships. In Latin, remora means delay. They’ve been seen as a curiosity, a hindrance, a goofy annoyance. They’ve been cataloged and studied and analyzed and gutted. More evidence of remoras as the victim than humans as prey. Yet I can’t, and likely will never, shake the memory of my remora, that shock and terror and loss of a false sense of security, of isolation and uncertainty. There’s a gap there, one that can’t be bridged with knowledge gained by Googling; a bridge I can’t cross, between what I know now and what I felt then. An exceedingly odd moment of connection, a symbiotic relationship in miniature. Being afraid with someone else. The cold hard facts and the unexplainable. Two things can and do coexist.