LIMBO

Curtis Winkelmann 26 March, 2024

The void-like limbo. The semi-nether. The achromatic desert and its never-ending nervousness. There’s a black vacuous gap fixed right at maturity’s middle, between the hoods known as child and adult, college and career, student and employee, where one finds themselves adrift in a kind of soul-slicing wonderment. Like a clogged toilet, questions swirl around the mind, cliched in their utter pretentiousness. If you’ve ever choked on your own spit and clung to life while others just watched then you know somewhat of the humiliation and emotional torture endured in this directionless state. The pathetic half-drowning and self-blaming. The static floatation through space and time. The crushing suspension and laughable paradox. The buoyant sensation fused with a certain kind of twisted heaviness. This stupefying lead-like panic that lazes in the stomach, indigestible. Anxiety aligning with a terminal illness, invisible yet deathly potent in the bloodstream. An internality becoming manifest. The non-stop plunge into a nightmare. A prolonged sense of disorientation. A kind of hangover from youth and its true freedom. The stale and tangy taste left in the mouth. Some stinging fear that haunts and stems not from what you’ve done but from what you will do every single day of the rest of your life. It’s a forecasted regret. A foul-smelling airless pocket in which you ask, What’s the opposite of Ignorance is Bliss? What’s the inverse of nostalgia? Because this feels close to it. A profound longing for a fond future and some dreaded self-awareness of everything yet to occur. This is the void-like limbo, the semi-nether, the endless achromatic desert of which I speak. Tell me you know it too.