Liminal Spaces

It has been more than three months since I last wrote anything here. College is over, somehow; graduate school has not yet begun. I find myself between discrete periods, between times to which I can assign meaningful labels. A moment of transition, a time which I know will not survive in my memory. My tendency to regard all of life as one continuous always-already-over moment, disrupted only by the inconsiderate irruptions of crisis which cause time to coagulate, forming immobile clots and slowing the otherwise inexorable flow that carries us toward death, contributes to the ambiguity with which I view the coming transition.

On the one hand, change is terrifying, especially change of this magnitude. On the other hand, I can't stand my present immobility and I know that I can only tolerate myself when I am forced to confront challenges out there, in that world which is my only refuge from self-indulgent Wertherism. But for the time being I wait, gnawing on myself, nourishing regrets and various evil thoughts, growing ever more anxious about that which I know is absolutely, unequivocally indispensable for my continued growth as a human being. The fact that I do not know what to expect is most important - I will have no choice but to adapt to the new arrangement of life there, in that new place, rather than preparing myself in advance to reject every new experience, to construct again the sort of endospore which kept me in idiotic stasis during my first year at college. Somehow, I will have to avoid that - that sort of contentment is a recipe for misery, after all. But the anxiety lingers somewhere behind the hopeful expectations which are sprouting timidly from my strange earth.