Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne:
Fishing for Souls (1614)

" … always somewhere in between."

I spend most of my days neither here nor there. I tend to transition between one and another state, not quite gone nor quite fully arrived at any particular point in time. My experience here has therefore seemed more of a smear than an occupation, not even my transitions precisely true to any clear standard. I have proven myself fully capable of fooling myself into insisting that I've successfully made transitions and somehow managed to grow up, for instance, even though many cues strongly suggest that I remain in transition. My presence anywhere remains distinctly ambiguous.

My Renewing efforts seem to be ending, or at least The Muse and I will be returning to ordinary time today. We will fly away with the scent of this faraway place still clinging to us, refusing to be abandoned. I suspect that our luggage will carry evidence of our excursion in the form of cockroaches and that they might set up an out-of-context colony, which might even survive for a season, though the climate and the cats will surely shortly do them in. We will not cleanly arrive back near The Center of the Universe, either. Our fresh experiences will have displaced our perspective on our position in the place. We will not return unchanged and will, therefore, never fully return.

I might seek to master my 'Tweenings since there's where I seem to live, but I cannot quite see myself seeing through the veil cloaking that space. I parse my life in whole numbers and account for my presence as present or absent. It does not make sense to the auditors that I might be exclusively both or neither, or both and neither, though I probably am, though 'am' loses its validity when my presence turns non-binary. I might solely inhabit spaces in between, seen only by either sunsets or dawns, yawning gaps between extremes I'll never once experience. I must be a verb. No noun could likely contain me.

I hail from The Never Could Say Goodbye Family. I disappear to bed early the night before leaving, preferring to miss the lingering goodbyes. I'd much prefer to wake up arriving and leave the messy traveling to anyone better suited to transitioning. However early I might slip away, or how tardily I arrive, I cannot seem to successfully hide from the 'Tweenings or the heartfelt goodbyes. We mean well as we attempt to separate into constituent parts, our parting neither sweet sorrow nor especially possible. We smear when passing and never entirely manage to get clear of any passage.

By this evening, I'll be forty-three days and fourteen walking hours away from where I woke up this morning, a distance The Muse and I will cover in fewer than twelve hours. Our souls, I suspect, will get stuck somewhere between, for souls never move faster than the speed of a walking horse. Forty-two days and change later, our souls will arrive near The Center of the Universe, expecting to find ourselves there. However, we will have undoubtedly traveled elsewhere by then, leaving our souls our 'Tweenings and ever in transition. We neither arrive nor leave anywhere cleanly, always somewhere in between.

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