Someone once told me that if you go to Utqiaġvik right after a whale hunt, you’ll find dozens of polar bears scavenging bowhead whale carcass on the shore, gorging on putrid meat. From a safe distance, you can watch them ripping flesh from the colossal severed head and bones left after Inupiat hunters have divided up the edible flesh and gone home to prepare it. You’ll see the blood smeared across their faces, their teeth glinting in the sun, the tiny cubs on the backs of their mothers as they journey toward the shore to join in.

I'm so in love with this gruesome image that currently resides in my head, a placeholder until I can create an actual memory of my own. I imagine the snowy beach stained with gallons of blood, one orange-sized eye dead in its socket, the other cut out by a hunter and donated to a scientist for study.

When people on the mainland ask me about the things I want to see most in Alaska, where I have now lived for three years, it’s the first sight that comes to mind. I tell everyone about it: the earth's last polar bears gathered together, despite being solitary animals, to feast on an enormous rotting whale. Some make a disgusted face, a sad face, a face that says Why would you want to see something so gruesome, so sad?

I know I want to see it because I am somewhere in the scene. We are often drawn to certain images because we see ourselves in them, warped mirrors that show us aspects of ourselves we’ve buried or forgotten. But am I the bear, or the whale? The dead eye, or the empty socket? Which do I want to be?

Many people back home ask me why I moved to Alaska. I tell them I moved here because I miraculously got a job in a terrible, stressful academic job market in poetry, and it sounded cool, and everyone at the university seemed nice. Some then say they admire me for my bravery, my sense of adventure and my survival thus far of the brutal winters (much less brutal than before climate change accelerated, but I’ve been outside in -35° F days). Others say it seems the perfect place for me to live, that they thought of me first when they saw the job listing on the infamous Wiki.

While my standard answer is true, the truth is I am not brave at all, not tough. I always run from things, instinctually avoid and escape. I moved to interior Alaska from Salt Lake City because the end of my fifteen-year "high school sweetheart" relationship coincided with the end of my doctorate, and after all that emotional and professional stress, I felt the urge to leave everywhere and everything, to be Nowhere.

The relationship left me with more wounds than I ever could have imagined back at 16, when we first decided to be a couple. After fifteen years of that relationship, which I am still unpacking and processing, I was suicidal and feeling completely alone, ready to stand at the edge of the earth, to exist at the end of all things. I wanted to escape time, to crawl out of my tainted body into a clean one, as bears crawl out from their hibernation in spring. I hoped to feel wild in that desolation, rather than stay trapped in my human self, the self that had for years invited so much pain into her body that it no longer felt like her own.

But as the adage goes, Wherever you go, there you are. And Alaska is, of course, Somewhere: people still live here, struggle here, love here, die here, as they have for thousands of years. We have a president and a governor who happily answers to him. We pay federal taxes that fund systemic deaths of all kinds, have prisons and police, racism, homophobia, and misogyny, though sometimes, when you’re hiking way out in the desolate wilderness, you can almost forget.

I have made much of my time here: driven through Denali National Park, seen several glaciers by both boat and foot, watched a moonless sky fully lit by aurora, and now hold a permit to visit the grizzly bears in McNeil River Sanctuary later this summer, but I've never gone to Utqiaġvik. Utqiaġvik, which white settlers called Barrow for nearly 200 years, is the northernmost village in Alaska (the 9th northernmost in the world) and only reachable by plane or boat. While in Fairbanks, we get three hours of otherworldly twilight on and around the solstices, in Utqiaġvik the summer sun never sets, and the winter sun does not exist.

A whitewashed version of the town serves as the setting of the 2007 horror film 30 Days of Night, in which old world vampires use the month of total darkness to feast on humans trapped there by the frozen wilderness, a mediocre film with a terrifying premise. “WELCOME TO BARROW, ALASKA -- TOP OF THE WORLD! POPULATION 563 -- WARNING! DANGER! POLAR BEARS!” reads the sign our heroes, the town cops, pass on their way back into the village. That kind of darkness scares people. They imagine it as teeth. Even in the film, they shortened the actual period of darkness to 30 days from 65, as if two months without sunlight—vampires or no—would be impossible to survive.

Rather than fearing it, I imagine that darkness as quietly extraterrestrial: the full moon irradiating the snow, the swirling storm of purple and green aurora encircling me, the waves of the Arctic Ocean cracking like many skulls against the ice. I like to think I could handle it, that I might actually feel at home there, Queen of Darkness at the top of the world.

But I often lie to myself about what I can handle, about the power that external circumstances have over my life and happiness. What does it matter if you were assaulted and coerced, I think. So what if he abused you? Was it really 'that bad,' or are you overreacting again, as he always said you did? The shame intensifies when I remember ‘that bad’ is uniquely subjective. Researchers claim some people are predisposed to traumatization, and to developing PTSD, which is why a similar event can traumatize one person and not another, which says to me I was born weak, too sensitive, too fragile.

Truthfully, though I romanticize it, I’m probably too fragile to endure the depth of that darkness at the end of the earth. Truthfully, the sight of a dead whale being ravenously torn apart by bears would probably bring me to tears, because in my acculturated upbringing whales were “humanized” more than some people, are beautiful and intelligent animals, whistle and sing to each other across vast distances, carry the bodies of dead newborns for miles, which suggests that (like us) they grieve. As a 90s kid who watched Free Willy a dozen times, maybe I still retain some naive childhood fantasy of forming a singular bond with a whale. Back then, in my daydreams, I saw myself raising my arms up as my orca friend and fellow misfit jumped to his freedom into the open sea, where his rightful family waited, leaving me behind forever.

Maybe the potential pathos generated by this morbid image is the source of my obsession with it. Maybe I need to feel it, to cry. Maybe I've gone too long without feeling and am trying desperately to find my way back. It’s a form of self-manipulation, like watching the sad scene from that childhood movie on YouTube over and over again to experience what you first felt, to get back to an intensely primal pain, the original empathic sadness, one felt before adulthood jaded you, before you learned that orcas are nicknamed “killer whales” because they often kill other whales, that the meat in your school lunch once had a mother: Littlefoot's crying for his mother to wake up after being killed by the T Rex, Bambi's mother shot dead by hunters, Simba's father murdered in front of him by Scar, Thomas J stung to death by wasps, Vada wailing over his coffin that he can't see without his glasses as the adults drag her away.

I’ve often sought out sad films and songs to coax myself into crying. I’ve also abused alcohol for the sole reason of accessing emotions I would never allow myself sober. I used to cry only when drinking alone. I'd encounter a memory, start to mourn the life I lost, all the crooked growing I did under stress, and suddenly feel for that girl, want to hug her, and cry an ugly cry, loud and moaning, sucking in air, snot all over my face like the whale blood smeared across the polar bears’ faces as they feast, like human blood across the vampires’ faces. When drunk, I'd allow myself to feel, to grieve. I don't drink anymore, and it's hard to get back to emotions organically, without that artificial disinhibition. It's hard to stay afloat.

Sometimes I wish I were like the whale in the scene, with its massive triangular head that can break through six feet of sea ice. They're often wounded by the ice in the process, as well as by orca attacks and fishing boats, so scientists know each bowhead whale by its unique pattern of scars, which become a kind of naming, an identity. Other times, I wish I were like the polar bear, which use their webbed feet to swim for days at a time, miles and miles, without tiring. Some of them swim 200 miles from Greenland to Iceland, where they are shot out of fear, despite being one of the world’s most rapidly decreasing species. Sometimes I want someone to be afraid of me, to feel that kind of power, knowing I never will.

Maybe I am both the whale and the bears together. I feel dead, numb, so I tear myself apart to feel pain. The pain makes me feel some version of alive, as if without it, I am nothing. My scars may not be visible, but they are mine, and each spells out a letter of a secret name, a true name, one which cannot be spoken, only felt.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.