Hey everyone, I know it’s been a little while since I’ve posted here. So here’s a small essay on Liminal Spaces.
You are alone in a place you once knew… or maybe you didn’t? Maybe you’ve never actually been here before. It’s warm like a long summer night and the colors are all washed out, cold and gray. The hues of each one are just the tiniest bit off. Others would feel a sense of dread and yet you feel calm and at peace, oddly comforted. You feel like you’re home again.
We as humans are psychologically wired to move forward. We get older, things change, and people die. Yet everyone, to a certain degree, will always long for the past, for a deep-seated desire to disappear. Maybe to a time when things felt safer and we felt more comfortable with life.
How does one travel back to the past? A question old as time itself. It’s common knowledge that the Time Machine doesn’t exist and most likely never will outside of fiction. I believe with such topics as Liminal Spaces we can do just that.
We may see photos of an empty theater or an abandoned mall and not only do we get that eerie forlorn sense of familiarity, of nostalgia, but, we are transported. Transported to those days spent walking through the mall with your teenage friends, or watching a movie with a loved one. If these walls could talk, oh the stories they would tell, but they can’t.
Whether it seems like it or not these places have moved forward, same as time itself. Thus allowing us to relate to them in a deeply intimate way.
It’s tricky though, because these spaces have moved forward, but also have not in a strange sort of way. For example, a building that was once a bowling alley bustling with impatient children out with their parents, to teenagers on their first date is now a grocery store. And fifty years from now it may just be a lonely place, devoid of all people, of life, of everything.
The wonder has evaporated and now we yearn for what was.
These places will disappear and disintegrate yet the memories held there will always remain placed firmly within that land for an infinite amount of time. Ghosts of a time that once was.
Thanks for another poignant essay. I like the idea of a metaphysical time travel story, one that delves more into the psychology of memory than the genre of science fiction (not that those aren’t enjoyable, too). 😁
Thank you, Devin! I agree, I love the idea of psychologically traveling through time as opposed to the more literal sense we’ve all come to associate with the idea.