In cities where gays, dolls and theys go out, some of them become photographers. Few of them become good photographers. These photographers take great pictures, and those pictures get filtered down to socials, magazines, and coffee table books. Coffee tables are often found in houses bought by white gays, with thick posh accents, master’s and doctorates. These white gays might occasionally use the coffee table for coffee, but more often than not will do lines of bad coke on top of their Tom Ford book.

On these tables, photograph books can be found, books with a lot of pictures and few words, usually smashed together into a paragraph that probably contains the words ‘hedonistic’ and ‘euphoria’. I am never in those pictures. And if I am, I appear in a way that I am rarely ever recognizable. I am rarely ever in the pictures.

I am too hot for the uglies and too ugly for the hots. I am too smart for the dumbs and too dumb for the smarts. I am too weird for the normal, and too normal for the weird. I am too efficient for the chaotic and too chaotic for the efficient. I am too mysterious for the knowledgeable and too knowledgeable for the mysterious.

My housemate walked through while I was writing this and saw the title scrawled across my laptop screen. “You’re not liminal,” he said, with the confidence of someone who’s never had to explain themselves at parties. “That’s not what it means. You’re just invisible.” Invisible. I wanted to argue, but something about it stuck. I might like the idea of being a contrarian, but the truth is that when an idea spins me around, I like to be spun. Around.

Spun around. Pun. Spinned. Golden shorts.

Liminal spaces, derived from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold,” are those weird corridors of existence; spaces that connect useful spaces. The hallway at 4am lit by flickering fluorescent light, the smoking area of a club when everyone’s too tired to flirt, the first September breeze that tells you summer’s dead, but autumn hasn’t really started living. The places and moments where we don’t belong, but we wouldn’t be lost either. We think of liminal spaces as thresholds. I mean, it does mean threshold (duh). Empty train stations, hotel lobbies at night, motorway service stops at 2am with warped Camila Cabello playing overhead. Places meant to be passed through. Transitional.

Invisible feels like magic. Liminal is just in between. People do see me. In fact, people photograph me, it’s just that they choose not to put me in their coke books.
My housemate thinks I’m invisible because he thinks
I think
I have talent and determination. People just don’t see it. Better said, people actively decide to ignore it.

The right opportunities happen to those who appear on the covers of underground magazines, those who get to be in the Instagrams of very cool and mildly succesful techno parties. The right opportunities seem to happen to those whose faces are clearly visible in coffee table photography books. I am too hot for the uglies and too ugly for the hots. I am too smart for the dumbs and too dumb for the smarts.

Invisible people tend to disappear. Liminal people live in the spaces others rush through without looking. We’re the ones paying attention when everyone else is trying to get somewhere else. We are also the ones stretching a bit too much, putting fingers in too many cookie jars, jacks of many trades, masters of none and never sure if that’s better or not than being a master of one.
I am too weird for the normal, and too normal for the weird. I am too efficient for the chaotic and too chaotic for the efficient. I am the 3am train home after a night of watching other people live their lives. The queue at the job centre. These aren’t failures but destinations in themselves.
Liminality is not a detour. It might be part of the architecture. Almost like the scaffolding holding up the parts we actually see and celebrate. And sometimes, it shows us who we are when the lights are low and the music’s still echoing (not Camila Cabello), just faintly, from another room. Still not in the pictures, still not in the books or the tables.

Is Cabello (as in Camila Cabello) spelled with an ‘L’, or two ‘L’s? I will never know. P, XOXO.

I don’t think I am waiting to be discovered. I’m already here, in the threshold, where all the interesting contradictions live. Too mysterious for the knowledgeable and too knowledgeable for the mysterious. Here, where we can want to leave and also stay. Where we can make peace with the idea of not knowing who we are, and not yet knowing what we are becoming.
I close my laptop and look at my housemate. “I’m not invisible,” I tell him. “I don’t think I like that word.”

I think

I am too hot for the uglies and too ugly for the hots. I am too smart for the dumbs and too dumb for the smarts. I am too weird for the normal, and too normal for the weird. I am too efficient for the chaotic and too chaotic for the efficient. I am too mysterious for the knowledgeable and too knowledgeable for the mysterious.
Not in the pictures.
But in
The heads of
others.

I know.