A while ago, I learnt this word, ‘liminal’. Liminal in simple terms means a stage of transition - moving from one point to another. The word had always looked and sounded normal until Reddit made it quite the opposite. At 2 am one night, I came across a post, which talked about liminal spaces. It piqued my interest.
Have you ever felt a sense of discomfort in a lonely parking lot in the basement of a mall? If you have, congratulations, you have been in a liminal space. You might assume it’s because of the very evident signs of discomfort. Maybe it’s the dark underground, the lack of colors or people. While all that is valid, liminal spaces are a little more than that. Most importantly, it’s everything that you can’t see, which causes the discomfort.
The loneliness, the eeriness, maybe a tinge of nostalgia and most importantly the unsettling awareness to get out of there as quickly as possible. Some other examples of liminal spaces include schools at night, empty playgrounds, motels, stairwells, roads post 1 am etc. But why do we feel this? It’s quite logical actually. This happens because your conscious self is unfamiliar with the feeling of staying in such places for too long. Think about it. We don’t stay in parking lots other than to park vehicles or unpark them. The place has no identity other than this. It is just an in-between place. So when we stay there longer than needed, (you might have experienced this if you had forgotten your parking spot) it feels unsettling. Most of these liminal spaces serve you as a point of contact between the past and the future. Whenever you are at these places, you have either already left something or you are looking forward to something and so you cannot stay long enough.
While this aesthetic has become popular on the internet over the years, I wonder how many people are yet to realize that life in itself is actually a liminal space. Maybe reality seems a bit altered sometimes because you are too afraid to stay stuck in the liminal space of life (i.e) the present? You’ve left something hoping to reach something else but you are never quite sure how long it will take.
Spoiler alert; you never really get out of the parking lot.
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