An Ode to In-Between Spaces

I sat in my car and watched the sky phase from day to dusk. I had just come from the gym; the door to my apartment a few feet in front of me. My couch waited on the other side. My bed. My no-bra-required space.

And yet here I was, just sitting in the car. Engine off, hands on the wheel, unmoving.

Night came.

See, in the car I was safe. Safe from the other beings that lurked behind the door. Dishes to wash, meal prep, laundry. Safe from my journals with days unfilled, unread books, and from a growing list of shows my coworkers recommend that I say I’d check out but never do. Safe from tomorrow, where work lived and waited.

The car was the in-between.

And in the in-between, you don’t have obligations.

Across cultures, this idea of existing between states has always fascinated me.

In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri has the First Circle of Hell reserved for unbaptized babies, pagans and philosophers. You’re not tormented there, but you yearn for a place to belong.

In Zoroastrianism, it’s a place of waiting for fate to be decided; a balance of good and evil. Not punishment but pause.

Greek mythology says it’s The Fields of Asphodel. A neutral place nested in the Underworld, characterised by a vast landscape filled with pale asphodel flowers. Souls drift here, living with muted memory. You’re not who you were, but not yet something else.

And at home in Trinidad & Tobago, it’s the birthplace of the limbo dance. A ritual born from the Middle Passage. Bodies bend impossibly low beneath a descending bar, echoing the passage between worlds: life and death, past and present, survival and reinvention.

My favourite way to understand life is through stories, so I went looking for myself there.

I didn’t find her.

I turned to the scholars.

In urban planning and architecture, “in-between” spaces bridge or connect structures — alleyways, corridors, courtyards and plazas. They aren’t destinations but passages. You move through, not towards.

Anthropologist Victor Turner called this state liminality. A phase in rites of passage where you are no longer what you were, but not yet what you will become. It is the middle of the story, stripped of identity and certainty.

Psychologically, it’s transitional states of adolescence, career changes, or heartbreak. The old self dissolves before the new one forms.

Modern aesthetics have tried to capture the feeling of “liminal spaces,” dreamlike empty malls, endless corridors, the soft hum of fluorescent lights.

These spaces, or states are all described as uneasy.

Unsettling.

But, I don’t feel unsettled. I feel ease.

Why does dusk feel like a deep exhale and dawn feel like quiet promise? Is it because I’m a middle kid, forever positioned between identities?

Am I something else entirely? Narsimha from Hindu “myth”? Neither man nor beast, inside or outside, night or day? Formed to resolve what cannot be resolved within fixed categories.

Is that why Hotel California is one of my favourite songs?!

Countless questions and no answer.

Which is the answer in itself.

Here, I don’t have to have answers. I’m the answer. It’s just me. I don’t need to choose a side. I was never meant to.

I’ve spent so long thinking the goal was to arrive; to pick a lane, define myself, settle into something solid and permanent.

But here, in the in-between, I don’t have to arrive.

So, here’s to the spaces without definition.

The coffee shops, the park benches, the car in stasis.

It’s not that nothing happens here, it’s that ANYTHING can happen here; without urgency or demand.

If you see Shalini sitting in her car, looking contemplative, don’t worry.

She’s not stuck.

She’s exactly where she wants to be.

Legend has it, she’s still there. Sitting in the car at dusk.