The God of Liminal Spaces
It’s good to finally meet you.
No, you don’t know me. But I’ve been around.
Oh, lots of times. Like when you were accidentally locked out of your family’s hotel room. You, a four-year-old, looking down the corridor, the pale red and white hexagons interlocking on the carpet, shrinking into the distance. The scent of bleach and pool chlorine. A labyrinth of vending machines, housekeeping carts, conference rooms, closets stacked with tiny shampoos, all longing to be explored.
The ditch behind your housing development. When you were eleven, you watched rainwater flow into the big concrete pipe that ran beneath the road, carrying the water to the other side of four-lane traffic. A heron stood, knee-deep, watching for fish and frogs passing in the current.
The arched overpass, the one that scared you when you were learning to drive. Lined with orange-globed streetlamps. It rose up, up in the dark, curving, like the Rings of Saturn. Nowhere to pull over. One wrong twist of the steering wheel could send you into Space. The night-city gleaming gently far away.
Gas stations and truck stops on turnpike roads with quarter-operated laundries and showers you can rent in fifteen-minute slots. Stacks of VHS tapes, instant oatmeal, crystal dragons in glass displays.
The airport, which glittered with chrome and white tile, except in that empty hallway, where it was dingy brown, where half the overhead lights were burned out and it was, somehow, still too starkly lit. No turnings or doors or terminals. Just one long straight hall leading through or under or beside or over whatever was beyond the walls.
I know because I was there.
You felt your soul shift in those places, didn’t you? Those non-places. You lingered, or you wanted to. To absorb the in-betweenness. But you couldn’t, because you were late for your connecting flight and a strange man was staring and you can’t stop on an overpass or live in a ditch with a heron and your mother opened the hotel room door and pulled you inside. Safe. Arrived.
You always had to arrive.
That’s never really what you wanted. But no one is supposed to long for the in-between. Not anymore. Oh, your ancestors exalted me, at Solstice and Equinox, at birth and death, at dawn and twilight, with bridges spanning mountains over river-rushed canyons, on the wood and stone lintels of their homes. Now, I am a god ignored. Relegated to utilitarian shipping docks and warehouse distribution centers, narrow alleys and flimsy bus stop shelters.
No one attends to the liminal. The thresholds are shabby and the gateways derelict. You rush past them, unseeing, unfeeling, to the destination. The journey is a hardship, a series of logistical hurdles, and the suitcases growling and biting at your ankles to hurry hurry hurry.
Because if you do anything but hurry past, shuttering your soul, then those strange, ambiguous landscapes might begin to seep inside. You become dizzy, then afraid, and so instead of falling into that disorientation—that liminal space—with open arms, instead of letting yourself be changed, you step aside. You avoid the discomfort. Refuse the unknown. And keep walking, and fast; you’re late to work.
So you never make it to the other side of anything. You only belong to one place. Static and one-dimensional. Satisfied with the illusion of external movement.
Well, not you.
I know you. You understand.
Or you might, or you could, or you think you will, once you see what lies on the other side of the hill where the highway spools and spools like a ribbon unravelling beneath a sky filled with clouds like whales, swimming on the wind.
You’ve never belonged anywhere. Not in the giggling little-girl circles of childhood, not in the whispering boy-crazed huddles of teenage-dom. Most comfortable alone, where there is no one to remind you of your not-belonging, or rather, no one to make you think not-belonging is wrong.
You want to belong, but to everywhere and nowhere. You can. You already do, every time you breathe—which is never a finished task, not until you die (and dying isn’t an arrival either, not really).
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
You belong, in that still moment between the end of the inhale and the beginning of the exhale. Between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the inhale.
You breathe the liminal, the neither here nor there. The almost.
You exist in the liminal. In between, in the breath. You are always passing through. The in-between is where you are alive. Does that make you uncomfortable? And does that discomfort feel good? Familiar? Nostalgic in its ungraspable, slipping-away-ness?
Ignoring that discomfort—ignoring me—is folly. To do so is to cast the most important parts of living into the landfill to rot, to waste what short lives you have.
Well. You know. I don’t have to convince you.
It’s nice, to talk to someone who understands. I get lonely. I don’t know what kind of a god that makes me, admitting that to you. But in this famine time where I am mostly forgotten, your moments of ablution, of awe, of wordless wonder… They matter. You matter.
I wish I could stay, but staying isn’t my forte.
You might see me again. Maybe. Keep moving. Be in between, belonging and not-belonging. Take it all into yourself. Change, and being changed, learn, not with words, but with something deeper and more ancient, something you’ve known since before you learned to speak, when your eyes had not yet lightened with the sun.
Then, tell them. Tell about the potholes, the roadkill, the mirage of wavering heat on the asphalt. Tell about the rainbow, the smell of the cattle lot, the toll booth like a little witch’s house on the edge of a forest—on the edge of the turnpike. Tell how you stood with awe in the shadow of a highway, traffic roaring by, bearing witness to the tadpoles flickering in a puddle in the gravel.
Allison Wall is a neurodivergent American writer with an MFA from Hamline University. She founded and runs NEURODIVERSION, a newsletter that centers neurodiverse news, research, and current events. Connect with Allison on her website, allison-