In Between

Secrets are spoken in corridors and lifts.

They are allowed to exist there because they aren’t really real spaces. They are in-betweens. Between offices. Between floors. Places you pass through rather than places you stay.

Perhaps that’s why people say things there that they wouldn’t say in the room they’ve just left, or the room they’re going to.

I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces.

There are plenty of them in my life at the moment. I work in a hotel, so I spend a lot of time in corridors and rooms that belong to nobody for a little while. I travel by train. I cycle over the water to Amager along a twisty path that feels almost detached from everything around it.

When the sun shines, the water sparkles as though it’s full of magic. When it rains, the surface becomes something else entirely: complex, shifting patterns, overlapping and disappearing before you can quite follow them.

I’ve spent the last six years in between things.

I came to Denmark as a student and lived in a hostel for a month while we found somewhere to live. I became someone who knew how to live here. I became a graduate. And now I’m somewhere between being a student and being a data scientist, between the person I was and whatever comes next.

I’ve been a housekeeper for a year.

It was supposed to be temporary. It still is, technically. I apply for jobs. I wait. I try to work out what my field actually is when “data science” seems to contain almost everything and nothing at once.

Sometimes being in between feels exciting. There’s a strange energy to it, like standing at the edge of a precipice and not knowing whether you’re going to fall or fly. I feel as though I’m vibrating, waiting for something to happen.

Sometimes it feels like a cage.

There’s a fairy-tale quality to standing still while the rest of the world moves around you. Other people seem to have destinations. I’m still on the path between them.

I’ve spent a lot of my life keeping myself hidden. Unseen. Safe in the shadows, where nobody was looking too closely. Staying small. Being useful. Supporting other people while they took the limelight.

I don’t want the limelight now. I’m not sure I ever did.

But I think I’d quite like to stop being the person standing just outside it.

Perhaps that is part of what makes this particular in-between feel different.

We only recognise thresholds afterwards.

In films, there is often a moment when the character crosses into the story. They don’t know it at the time. They walk through the door, get on the train, leave home. We know because we’re watching from outside.

They don’t.

Maybe that’s what being in between is.

Not knowing whether you’ve arrived somewhere, because you don’t yet know where you’re going.

And maybe that’s where the quiet power of it lies.

Nothing has been decided yet.

The next thing hasn’t happened.

There is still room to become something I can’t quite see from here.