I had been ready to die, pretty much. To close my casket from the inside. To entomb myself in a little plastic pod filled with saltwater and float in darkness for an hour and a half, sightless, soundless, senseless—to sink into shadow and succumb to the void.

Ripple Float & Wellness Center keeps the tone light, though. They’ve got beanbags and watercolor paintings and potted aloe vera. In the lounge, there’s a bookshelf with titles like Gracefully You, Global Bohemian, and The Art of Happiness (by the Dalai Lama). The tea is ginger-spiced and gut-healthy, the candles are scented, the couch cushions are macramé.

The man at the front desk, Bryan, hands me a laminated sheet to pick the color lights for my tank. I ask if anyone ever actually chooses red lights, my eyes widening at one photo where the water glows like it’s on fire. “We get a lot of veteran floaters that ask for them, actually,” he says with a laugh. “Red causes less dilation on the eyes.” I try to imagine floating in red water and can already hear the Jaws theme—I go for a calm aquamarine instead.

Eli picks aquamarine, too. He’d asked to tag along about a week ago. He didn’t know much about floating either (he was imagining a fifteen minute affair with clothes on, for starters), but he was hoping it might put his life into perspective, removing himself from it all for a while. “I want to see what the nothing can tell me about the something,” he quipped.

Me, I’m much more interested in the nothing than the something. The real world, all its messy particulars and contingencies, it’s okay. It’s just so specific. I’ve never been good with details, Mondays and Tuesdays and so on. I first heard about sensory deprivation tanks in my philosophy class last semester. We were talking about Descartes—are we minds beyond matter? Simple, indivisible, pure? Do it, doubt the world, doubt your body, all the sharp angles, the rough patches, strip it all away. What’s left? I figured the questions were hypothetical until our professor told us about the tanks—he said he floated in one about once a month, in a spa by the Omni Hotel. 

I went down a Googling rabbit hole that night, head full of demons and dreamers, selves without senses, pure essences and lofty abstractions. Turns out, more and more people have been seeking out sensory deprivation tanks over the past decade, to help them sleep better, to stress less, to chill all the way out. Some of them come out rhapsodizing about cosmic oneness and nigh-on nirvana. Praise piles on praise: it’s rejuvenating, it’s psychedelic, it’s ‘meditation on steroids,’ a shortcut to the deepest levels of mindfulness anyone can reach, monks aside. It’s also great for your skin. What can I say: I was a fish eyeing a hook. I bit.

Once Eli and I make our light and music selections, Bryan leads the way to the corridor with the float tanks. I take my coat off as we squeeze into one of the rooms, hot and humid. There’s a little space to undress, a shower, and a white plastic door in the wall leading to the flotation tank. Bryan runs through the pre- and post-float instructions, gives us a smile, a thumbs up, and lets us get on with it.

I say the tank door looks like a spaceship, and Eli laughs, though it wasn’t very funny. He says he’s nervous, and we both laugh, though that wasn’t very funny either. He crosses the corridor to his own room and starts closing the door. “See you on the other side.” 

After shutting my own door, I take off my clothes, put on earplugs (salt in your ears, very crunchy, not fun), and shower as Bryan instructed. And then I open my tank. It’s more of a room, really, tall enough to stand in: the water glows a soft aquamarine, and the rainforest track I chose turns on, greeting me with faraway bird calls, creaking frogs.

I step inside. The water is slow to move through, thick with salt. I lower myself, slowly, slowly, careful with my eyes, fearing the decidedly unrelaxing burn of hundreds of pounds of Epsom salt. Then, I close the door behind me. I shut off the aquamarine lights, mute the music, silence the frogs. And I let myself float.

I’m breathing too quickly. I can hear myself sucking the air through my nose, feel the whoosh of it through my chest. I try to calm down. I tell myself it’s all fine and normal, being naked in a strange tank in the dark and hearing your heartbeat in your ears and tasting salt in the thick air. I focus on my breath. The in and the out. With each exhale, my muscles slowly start to loosen, and I let myself sink deeper and deeper. My neck softens, my head falls back, and, soon enough, my body has completely let go. When the saltwater hovers just an inch below my eyes, I discover that I can’t bring myself to worry about it.

I’ve settled in now. All that’s left is to lie still, stare into the darkness, and wait. I’m ready to forget my body, to cast off my senses and enter some Cartesian consciousness. Only, the longer I float, the more sensations I start noticing. I feel my lower ribs jutting out from the surface of the water. I feel the water from the shower tickling the hairs on my face, above my mouth, hardening my skin as it dries. I blink—I can feel my eyelids. Am I supposed to stop feeling my eyelids? How do I stop feeling my eyelids??

After a while, I admit it to myself. It’s just not going to happen. I had been holding out hope for an out-of-body experience, but ultimately I can feel everything I would’ve expected from floating around in some salty water in the dark for ninety minutes. Wet, warm, and a little silly.

Still, I keep on floating. I wonder how much time it’s been. I listen to my breathing, watch purplish blobs appear against the black. And I’m right—I never forget my body. But then I hear an echo from something outside, and I realize with a start that, for a moment, I had forgotten that there was an outside. I just hadn’t been thinking about it. My thoughts are all darkness and water and salt. I didn’t catch when, but at some point life beyond the tank had slipped away from me—right now, my whole world is just this little tank. I have nobody waiting for me, nothing to do, nowhere to go.

I start fighting to keep my eyes open, but then I can’t give myself a reason why. It doesn’t matter whether I fall asleep or not in here—any worries about wasting the experience, or not having anything to write about, are too faint, too far away, for my mind to get a grip on. I try to care. I can’t quite pull it off. Instead, I listen to my breath and my heartbeat, and I just exist there, in the darkness and the nothing, not thinking about much of anything but that breath, that beat. And then I fall asleep. 

A few hours ago, I woke up on a couch in my friends’ suite. We had stayed up until 2 AM the night before and I didn’t want to walk back in the cold. The day came to me slowly, the golden light, the heater humming, the bad breath, a ghost of yesterday’s pizza. One friend was already awake, and another woke up soon after, and they both decided it was a great idea to try and all fit on the couch at once. I felt someone’s elbows poking into my stomach as they piled on top of me, and there were ows and oys, and my laughter squeezed against someone else’s ribcage, and my leg went numb, and my arm got stuck between the cushions, but none of us had any intention of leaving. We lay there, talking about nothing, until the others woke up and we went to brunch. I could’ve stayed like that for longer, so warm and weighed down.

When I wake up in the darkness again, I’m wet and alone. I feel strange, a quieter thing, hollower, almost. I know I’m just in the tank, but, after waking up inside it, thinking about the world before I started floating feels like recalling a dream. The memories are vague, hazy. So I just keep floating, like I did before, like it feels like I’ve always been doing. I don’t even have to try to clear my mind—it’s been emptied out. Nothing is urgent enough to concentrate on. Thoughts drift by; I let them go.

Suddenly, a woman’s voice cuts through the silence, telling me that my float is over and if I could please step outside so the self-cleaning process can begin. Her voice is low, harsh. I hate her. I squint when the blue lights turn on. When I recover, the first thing I see are my legs, and they surprise me—I had forgotten my body would look like anything. I draw them tight to my chest and stay there, curled up in the warm water, not wanting to leave my cocoon, not even wanting to think about it. After a few minutes more, the water starts churning like a jacuzzi—this tank is going to self-clean, with or without me. I force myself to stand up and push open the door to the bright-white room. 

The air I thought was clammy before is now far too cold. I drag myself out of the tank, step into the shower, compel myself to turn it on. The water hits me harshly, stripping off what’s left of the thick salt solution I had been swaddled in. I remember I still have my earplugs, and pull them out—all of a sudden, sound becomes as sharp as sight, too high, too grainy. I want to put them back in. I hear Bryan talking to Eli outside. “Oh, I know that face—that’s the oh, shit face!” Eli laughs out loud, light and easy. I have no idea how he can do that—the thought of trying to talk to anyone right now exhausts me. I pat myself dry and put clothes over slightly damp skin, socks on slightly damp feet. It all feels very wrong and scratchy. Trying to ignore the water from my hair seeping into my sweater, I force myself out the door.

Eli is standing over the kettle in the lounge. He had a great time. He had been spinning around, bobbing here and there, positioning his arms every which way—at his sides, behind his head, starfished. At some point, he even started trying on different accents—he realized that he could be anyone, not just in the tank, but outside of it, too. “I was thinking about the narrative of my life,” he said. “How I could change it.” I say that’s so exciting. I hope I sound excited. He asks me how my float went, but all I’m thinking about is my cold hair, my itchy sweater, the warm quiet I want to crawl back to. How did my float go? I’m still floating. Well Eli, I didn’t feel human, and honestly I don’t feel quite human right now.

But I don’t say that. I fiddle with my mug. “Really weird.”

We steal some organic tea bags and go outside. As we’re walking back to campus, Eli says he’s remembering how happy it made him in the tank to think about going back to his life. “I was thinking, like, this is great, and I’ll be here for ninety minutes and enjoy it, but I’m excited to go back into the world.” He had thought a lot about his friends—he had felt like hugging everyone as soon as he saw them. 

I hadn’t really thought about my friends in the tank. Definitely not about hugging them. I think about them as he says it, though. And the more we walk, whatever strange, vacant creature I was in the tank begins to fall away. I savor the strength of my legs, pushing down against the pavement. My arms cutting through the air. The moon comes out from behind an apartment complex, a motorcycle roars by, a little girl tugs her mother into Ben & Jerry’s, giggling. A hug sounds nice, I tell him. Really nice. Eli says something funny, and I tip my head back to laugh.