Places where reality is a bit altered:
• any target • churches in texas • abandoned 7/11’s • your bedroom at 5 am • hospitals at midnight • warehouses that smell like dust • lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore • empty parking lots • ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods • rooftops in the early morning • inside a dark cabinet
playgrounds at night
rest stops on highways
deep in the mountains
early in the morning wherever it’s just snowed
trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic
schools during breaks
those little beaches right next to ferry docks
bowling alleys
unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips
your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep
laundromats at midnight
what the fuck
galeries in art museums that are empty except for you
the lighting section of home depot
stairwells
•hospital waiting rooms •airports from midnight to 7am • bathrooms in small concert venues
I just got the weirdest feeling I swear
OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!
A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.
The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.
Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.
This is why I work third shift.
In some Irish mythos these are also called “thin places” – places where one world seems to meet another. You also get these places in your life sometimes, often in transitional periods (after a move or just before a divorce or change from school to the working world or even just when construction has changed your automated-don’t-even-think-about-it driving path home). It can also happen in other times, like after a tragedy – basically any time you become hyper aware, almost able to step outside your own life. Both the literal and the figurative thin places can be some of the best settings to seek out and write about because they are uncomfortable and make you think in ways you and the reader normally don’t or even, perhaps, can’t. It’s a reason we cling to death and love and betrayal as settings for our stories, but as you can see, there are infinite liminal spaces to choose from in order to jolt a character into a new or different awareness.
