With each inhale, the small pink balloons of my lungs swelled, lifting me a few inches off the sand鈥攏ot into air, but water. As I exhaled, a string of bubbles tickled up my face, growing into bulbous, cellophane-like jellyfish by the time they reached the surface, 60 feet above. With empty lungs, I settled back down, my weight sending pearls of white sand dancing away across the textured seafloor.

I was on the bottom of the Red Sea, sitting cross-legged in a world of blue, the only place to cool off. It was 2010, I was serving as a crew member aboard a marine-research vessel, and for most of our three-week voyage on the sea, the thermometer stayed in the triple digits, at best dropping to the nineties in the middle of the night. Simply jumping off the boat provided no relief鈥攖he surface was like bathwater.

Our 114-foot-long ketch, which I鈥檒l call Persephone, was anchored off the volcanic, uninhabited islands of Yemen鈥檚 Zubair archipelago. We had to repair the roller-furling system before entering the most dangerous stretch of the voyage鈥攁n area called Pirate Alley, which we鈥檇 been dreading for months. That summer, the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and Somalia, was making international news due to a spate of boat hijackings. The pirates weren鈥檛 looking for cargo; they wanted hostages. There were ten of us aboard this slow boat, hailing from the U.S, France, and Belgium. We had no weapons. We were a perfect target.

The day before, 175 miles north of the Gulf of Aden, we heard a distress signal on our VHF radio. A man鈥檚 voice crackled through the thick static, in what sounded like a Greek accent.

鈥淗elp us, help us!鈥� he said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e being boarded鈥� pirates鈥� We鈥檙e being boarded鈥� surrounded鈥︹��

Another voice responded, asking their location. The man shouted out coordinates, then fell silent. We never heard him again and never learned what happened. The range on our radio was only 40 miles.

It had been almost a year since I鈥檇 joined this crew, and I鈥檇 scarcely had a moment to myself since. As soon as I was alone and could think about anything other than our freshwater supply, or cleaning the head, or pumping the bilge water from the bosun鈥檚 locker, my mind seemed to empty. I spent that first dive floating in some liminal place between worlds鈥攁way from the hot, crowded ship, the yelling captain, the over-masculine crew, the suppressed grief for my dead father that brought me here in the first place. I felt serene for the hour and twenty minutes I sat down there, empty thoughts opening like glass parachutes above my head. But my mind would not remain empty for long.

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