Ruminations in Limbo

Madds Ellis

The tragedy is in the unknown. It almost always is, for there can be no certainties for a humankind so vast, especially when empathy is conflated with submission. We’ve learned that now. Some had already known this, but now the rest of us have caught up. Parts of the human experience—that many-limbed figure—shy from decision, from the definite, from black and white; they stay still, suspended, drawn into themselves.

The tragedy is in the bigger picture. Staticity implies different things for different people; sometimes one implication is worse than another. And it’s impossible to know how to help, how to level the playing field, how to fight fair. And perhaps the answer is that there is no answer. Maybe that’s the reality and we’re simply delaying its solidification in our collective truths.

The tragedy is how quickly we’ve become acclimated to discomfort. It’s how prepared we are to lay down on our swords. It’s how recklessness becomes hypocrisy, how it becomes aggression, how it becomes hurt. We acquiesce to the idling engine. We take comfort in its sputtering and aborted churns, for this means that we can finally be done. We’ve tried our best, given our all, but the car simply will not go. And isn’t that fantastic?

It’s not the answer we wanted, no, but it’s an answer, and it’s an order: give up. Try again later.

But the great thing about limbo—and it really is great—is that the unknown has no rules. No expectations. The clammy hand pressed into the middle of our backs draws away, unsure which direction to push us, and so we propel ourselves. We break apart and become something new, something we’ve built ourselves, something we can be proud of. We learn new words, watch new movies, listen to new music, read new books, draw new things, make new discoveries. We learn things about ourselves that we hadn’t had the time to learn in the rigamarole of Life Outside the Home. We were too busy. It’s saccharine, painfully so. But now our car has been stalled on the side of the highway for over a year, and we’ve noticed that, past the guardrails, a field stretches out toward the horizon, and flowers creep onto the pavement, and cows mull over the land lazily, and beyond the sun, behind it, maybe, there is the secret knowledge that life has been going on all along.