For most people, Limbo doesn’t last very long. Their escape is relatively easy. Maybe they never even entered it at all, knowing all too well that an everyday weekend seemed just too good to be true. For others though, like me, the deluded fearful, escape is not so easy. In fact, it appears damn-well near impossible from where I’m currently standing. Escape calls for maturity. It’s a final crossing, an official exit out of childhood. It’s a hard thing to conquer for it’s no tangible feat. It’s not strictly just getting a job, starting a family, wearing a suit-blazer causally, sneezing with a scream, cooking stews in crockpots or crocheting little woollen tea cosies for your AirPods case, it’s much more than that. It’s the grim and ugly reality of life that some of us find impossible to accept. It’s the first step towards death, the ultimate abandonment of humour, the taking of life seriously.

So how can we escape on our own terms? I believe it’s simple, we can’t. Escape implies a certain level of contorted effort to achieve freedom. A releasing action is imagined when one employs the term escape. Our Limbo is invisible, internal, how does one escape from something shapeless that’s within them? It’s impossible. But that’s not to say we remain in limbo forever, very few evidently do. If we return to the idea of it being a kind of flu, a disease, coursing through our brain seams and sensory stems, we can start to see Limbo as something that will eventually fade away if properly treated, or perhaps, more accurately, something that we will eventually fade away from. Like the last glow of a lightbulb who’s switch has just been flipped, it’s a sudden death that seems slow. You feel as though you could watch the whole process with relaxed temperament, but in reality the light vanishes instantaneously. In the same way we don’t escape a disease, we don’t escape Limbo. There is a gradual recovery, a change of state. It is something which must be waited out, allowed to live some form of life to ultimately die an invisible death. It’s a catalyst that shapes us for the next humourless stage of life, a traversed inferno, a suffering necessary. We need to feel as though we’ve earned our maturity, mourned our joke-infused childhood, and I believe living through Limbo is how.