I am on a plane, ready to depart. The guy standing in the aisle asks if this is row 27.
It is.
He thanks me and sits down in the empty seat next to me, making a joke about the lack of leg room on aircrafts.
Such a snobby word. I laugh.
He asks if I’m going home. Am I?
I nod - yes, I am going home but I live here.
I say that it is difficult to live in-between places, being neither flash nor fowl.
He laughs - he thinks it is actually nice to exist in the space in-between. As far as we’re young enough, we can inhabit this jolly purgatory. Stability will come to us later in life.
Oh really, will it?
It’s fun to live in the space in-between, having some of both worlds, he insists.
I nod and smile and turn my head towards the window, watching the flickering lights disappearing in the darkness of the night.
A feeling of betrayal and misunderstanding pervades me - I think, this handsome stranger only tried to make small talks but got it all wrong.
I used to like the space in-between. Or did I? The identity gets lost.
It evolves as it could never evolve by staying in the same place your whole life.
Travelling somewhere for a few days or even weeks is not the same thing - in travelling there is movement, there is change.
In living in the space in-between, there is routine, repetition and yourself. That you cannot escape.
I am grateful to be where I am - this is a recurring line in my gratitude journal - but I’m also terrified: I am neither this nor that anymore.
I am in-between lives, in-between cultures, in-between personalities.
I don’t belong. My thoughts race: have I ever belonged? To anywhere, to anyone?
This feeling of loneliness has taken residence within me since my childhood.
I can never scroll off that sense of abandonment, of sweet sadness that follows me everywhere I go. It tastes like sugary red wine.
I am not my thoughts, I am not my feelings, but what am I?
I’ve tried to escape, many times. I went places, been with different people, tried different hobbies but that sense of misplacement has never left me.
It is like carrying around a heavy block of marble, everywhere I go and whoever I’m with.
When I try to leave it somewhere, it magically finds its way back and makes its unwelcome return to remind me that, deep down, I am lonely.
It lives in my stomach, just beneath my heart, and it makes sure I take my recommended dose of nostalgia every other day.
I’m still deciding what I’m supposed to do with this marble block - shall I fight it? Shall I just leave it there? Shall I accept it? I can only hope that years of therapy will give me the strength to befriend this abusive flatmate, one way or the other. The choice is mine, they say.
Back on the plane. The handsome stranger next to me makes a couple of other remarks about London and about the weather - a safe middle ground for both of us. No more talks about home, no more talks about the space in-between.
He then takes his ear pods out and closes his eyes - he’s ready to depart, he’s ready to go home.
