What are they called?

The spaces that exist between this world and that one, yesterday and tomorrow?

The ones we walk through like a station, freshly off one train but still waiting for the next with a suitcase in one hand and a vague concept of where we are heading in the other?

Liminal.

CHANGING WORLDS

Freshly graduated, I can already feel the ground changing beneath my feet as the world I knew rolls into the one that I am about to.

I was walking through a neighborhood of old Victorian houses the other evening, the ones I used to point little fingers at from the stroller. I grew up around them, watching their bones become brittle and hollow as mine grew strong and concrete.

I loved their secrets, their stories, their grand presences. They looked like my dollhouses, like Normal Rockwell palaces. I used to gaze through the windows and imagine which one my bedroom would be on the other side of. I imagined the games I would play on the endless, mahogany stairwells and scouted the best branches for the long swings, the best grassy spots for tea parties, the best sidewalks for skating, for skinning my knees on.

Then the bedroom window mattered less for aesthetics and more for practicality. I had seen the movies. Where would it need to be for a guy to stand beneath it with a stereo on his shoulders? Stairwells became for prom photos, branches for photography, grassy spots for reading books, and sidewalks for walking all over with music in my ears, tracing my fingers over the scars of youth.

I DON’T KNOW WHEN

Now, somehow into my twenties, those houses look entirely different all over again.

I feel the need to reintroduce myself. I look up into one and see a world I never used to. I see bottles of wine being poured at dinner parties in the dining room and candlesticks burning. I see myself typing at the kitchen table over steaming coffee and dancing bare foot in the kitchen to Al Green on Saturday afternoons with all the windows open. All of the windows are open.

I hear little footprints that are not my own. I am not sure when they stopped being my own.

My world is changing again. Like a stage between scenes, anonymous figures are running around deconstructing the place I knew, carrying the bits and pieces that I don’t need anymore off the stage. They are assembling something new, something I can see in brilliant colors when I close my eyes.

Walking around those old Victorian houses now, I close my eyes and see that world. I open them and see past worlds, running around my ankles, whacking my shins with scooters and asking me to paint with them. I see myself at fifteen, on the grass, staring up into the sky and thinking too much. I close them and it falls away.

When I open them again, everything is reset. I am twenty-one standing on the side walk, walking through spaces that exist between worlds. The spaces that I have no real name for, only love.

Only fondness.

LIMINALITY

For liminality is a fractured space, drenched in shadow yet splintered with light.

It is a space removed, a space left floating in a void that is so vast and so deep that you feel that you could do anything. I got coffee with my also recently graduated friend today and all we could talk about was feeling that we could just do anything.

Can we really just do anything?

Liminality is either a harrowing pit of despair or a sun bleached oasis of open sky, but I grew up in Southern California. I spent every summer staring into sunburnt skies. I only know how to fall into them, never out, never back down again. I tasted despair once, it left a bad taste in my mouth and then nothing at all. I tried hopelessness on, it hung too loose on the shoulders and made my skin itch. Apathy was cold and coolness was empty. The harrowing pit of despair spit me right back out for being picky.

So liminality is not a lost place to me. It’s not a waiting ground. It’s a world of it’s own.

It’s the playground at recess. It’s the moment you lift one hand off the monkey bars and put all of your trust in the other, falling in love with the rush of suspension for the first time. Falling in love with the surety of knowing that the ground will catch you.

Liminality is the marrow, the nourishment, the deserted place you stop to float and breathe and prepare to become more in. More. Like Alice in the underground, the room is suddenly too small. My limbs are sticking out, reaching for more.

A professor once told me that the only difference between animals and humans is that we aspire. We want more.

Maybe it’s like that.

Love, m.

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