When my sister and I were kids, sometimes we’d play Barbies and a quiet would fall over the house. We’d fall quiet ourselves and have this “feeling”. We’d always address this feeling as “that thing”, and as the years passed and we played with different toys and different games in our old house, sometimes we’d both look at each other and say “That thing is happening again”.
It was impossible to describe, but we knew we both felt it.
“That Thing” (is not just the Lauryn Hill Song)
My husband bought me a can of Sweet Justice Pacific Island Punch for Mother’s Day, which I eagerly cracked open and drank before putting the kids to sleep. I had a bath and then sat before my computer, not with the intention of writing. I just needed a night to sit back and guiltlessly enjoy a YouTube wormhole.
I stumbled upon the following video about the comforting side of liminal spaces, and I thought, “Yeah, sure, I’m down.”
High and fully immersed, I realized that “that thing” was happening.
I finally made the connection.
“That Thing” is Liminal
Like many terminally online folk, I’ve been fascinated by the liminal space aesthetic for a while. It started in 2019 when I was on maternity leave after having my son. I’d spend endless nights awake watching tours of dead or abandoned malls. In February 2020, I wrote “Modern Ruins”1, a short story about a depressed millennial father of three who becomes obsessed with his local abandoned mall.
The mall was where he met his now wife, Dawn, but it was also where he had countless lunch breaks and bought CD’s2, the hallways stuck within memories, now lost to time and decay.
Writing it was very cathartic because I was living in a period of transition (my final months of maternity leave), and I was nostalgic for my early 20-something life that was without obligation. Those early winter months of 2020 really had me wrapped in a transitional moment, and the writing of “Modern Ruins” felt like a transitional piece for me.
Of course, then Covid happened and threw everything for a loop, but I do think fondly back to those cold February nights when writing felt like meditation. It really felt like processing the memories, small little moments stuck in my brain, unsorted things that could be easily lost or forgotten, tossed into a mental doom box for me to find sometime later.
Throwback Culture
There are a billion millennial meme accounts of us fawning back to earlier days of McDonald’s birthday parties. Simpler times when we followed our fashion-obsessed aunts around the women’s section of Hudson’s Bay, pockets full of perfume sample cards. Calmer times when summer breaks were spent eternally in the basement playing video games.
Those memories live in filtered saturation in my brain, and no throwback culture revival of the beloved Canadian value-driven department store Zellers is going to make them come back.
None of my beloved 90s treats ever make me feel “that thing”.
The funny thing about the adult millennial experience is that we live in a world that caters to our nostalgia in the worst of ways. Everything becomes a meme and everything is brought back from the dead. We live in a literal Pet Sematary full of our beloved things.
I indulge in a bag of Gushers every so often. They taste just like how I remember, but the feeling is hollow. It’s just an old thing brought back from the dead. I let my kids eat a few, and I tell her about how much I loved them when I was a kid. I make her watch the commercial and she just cringes.
She doesn’t care. Candy is just candy to her. At least for now.
None of my beloved 90s treats ever make me feel “that thing”.
I had no expectations of feeling “that thing” when I visited the revamped Zellers in my city. It looked like a fucking Target, which is a horrible vibe in general if you’re Canadian and have the Canadian Target experience. The store was vacant, the aisles empty, the space hollow. It just wasn’t that outdated, dirty tile-floored building that I remember.3
Nothing brought back from memory is how I remember, because it can’t be.
Using Liminal Space to Disappear
A picture of a liminal space works differently than ripping open a fresh packet of Kool-Aid. Most liminal spaces aren’t spaces you’ve ever been in. But they are, as TikTok compilations will tell you, “oddly familiar”.
Horror has used liminal space to great effect as well, and what makes them so scary, especially in video games, is being forced to exist in these places. Looking at photos is different, I’m not actually there. It’s out of context. I have to use my imagination to navigate it, and I”m not going to let myself be afraid, because the experience is all in my head.
Looking at liminal spaces makes me feel like I’m opening a doom box full of random shit. The things inside don’t entirely doesn’t make sense, but at some point, something compelled me to put said things in there. To create a memory. Not a complete one, though. The nostalgia that liminal space triggers lacks context.
I have to give it context
That context is always a blended version of dread, sadness, and weirdly, comfort. It’s like swimming in a lake where I can’t see beneath me, the water hiding reality when I know deep down that there are no monsters in the darkness.
There’s only “that thing”.
And I take comfort because while the feeling might be odd and unsettling, I know that at times you must feel it too.
Footnotes
You can read “Modern Ruins” in the LOST CONTACT anthology from Ghoulish Books.
There’s a scene in “Modern Ruins” where the protagonist reflects on buying a copy of Franz Ferdinand’s sophomore album, You Could Have It So Much Better, which is my favourite of the band’s catalogue. I bought my copy shortly after returning to Canada after a month-long Christmas trip to the Philippines. It was weird to go from a tropical climate to a cold and frigid one. I didn’t work at the time and spent every day at home, trying to write while watching snow fall with this album playing. It provides more nostalgia than liminality, but I still am very fond of the album and think of that weird comfort I sometimes would get staring out the window at the cold Canadian environment I wanted to void.
Whenever I think back to Zellers, I remember the one I grew up going to, and then I think of the uptown location near the house I rented after I dropped out of college. I used to buy yarn there, and it was an ageing disaster that looked and felt exactly like this when you walked through it.