You learn first what you can open, and cannot. Like the chipmunk you caught cleaving walnuts, or the otter shattering oysters upon rocks, you discover how to bludgeon coconuts, guillotine pineapples. You forget the taste of a first kiss you can’t talk about. Honey badgers court cobras they sever at the neck with the same teeth that crack tortoise shells, defy lions. They shake vigorously, heedless of envenomed fangs. You grew up feeding from the sea: beaked parrotfish, shucked opihi, kelp paper. Your father’s family emerged from Jeju, an island where husbands kept kids and women coaxed the ocean to open up her secrets: pearls and serpents, crabs and sea cucumbers, cracked abalone and lusty lobsters. How many thoughts did you hide away, calcify, only to be husked or neatly flayed naked? How many friends did you teach to wield a waiter’s corkscrew—decapitate wine bottles—the right way? It’s easy, see: once you’ve opened one, you’ve opened all of them.