The Liminality Loop

The difficulty with calling it grief is that grief implies a singular object, whereas what I remember from those years was a growing preoccupation with access, though even now I hesitate over that word because access sounds practical, almost administrative, when what I was actually reaching toward was something much stranger and far less definable, a sense that somewhere inside his silence existed a door that, if opened, would return us not merely to one another but to some earlier version of reality in which my father had died and yet somehow the world remained recognizable.

The thing that continues to trouble me is that every explanation seemed capable of surviving only until the next one arrived, and because each successive attempt appeared, for a brief period, to illuminate some previously obscured portion of the landscape before dissolving into the same uncertainty from which it emerged, I developed the increasingly uncomfortable habit of following every line of thought farther than it probably deserved, not because I believed it would lead anywhere definitive but because abandoning it felt premature, as though some essential detail remained just beyond reach and would reveal itself if only I stayed with the question a little longer, though "a little longer" gradually became weeks and then months and eventually years, during which time I became less interested in grief itself than in the peculiar transformations grief seemed capable of producing within perception, because what had once appeared obvious no longer did, what had once seemed stable acquired a strange instability, and experiences I would previously have dismissed as contradictory began presenting themselves as simultaneous.

Somewhere within this period there emerged a growing suspicion that the distance I kept locating in other people possessed an unsettling resemblance to something occurring within myself, though resemblance is perhaps not the correct word because resemblance suggests comparison and comparison requires separation, whereas what I encountered felt more like recurrence, the same pattern appearing under different conditions, first between myself and my husband, then between myself and my father, then within memory, then within language, each iteration carrying enough similarity to suggest connection while differing sufficiently to prevent certainty, leaving me repeatedly confronted by the possibility that I was not tracing multiple phenomena but a single one whose shape changed depending upon where I happened to be standing when I encountered it.

At various points I became convinced that witness occupied the center of the problem, though center implies a geometry I no longer trust, because every time I approached what appeared to be the heart of the matter it revealed itself to be merely another passage leading elsewhere, another chamber connected to something older, and what began as grief increasingly acquired associations with visibility, recognition, significance, value, belonging, each concept appearing unexpectedly attached to the others in ways I had not anticipated, so that the loss of one threatened the stability of all of them simultaneously, producing an experience that felt disproportionate even as it was occurring, though the recognition of that disproportion offered no meaningful relief because identifying a reaction as excessive does little to diminish it.

What remains difficult to describe is the peculiar sensation of living inside an unanswered question for so long that it gradually ceases to feel like a question at all and instead begins functioning as an environment, a climate through which every subsequent thought must travel, altering the shape of whatever enters it, and perhaps this is why the language of thresholds appealed to me so strongly, not because I imagined myself standing at a clearly defined border separating one state from another but because I increasingly suspected there was no border, only a prolonged period during which categories that had once appeared distinct became impossible to separate, grief from love, absence from presence, memory from observation, loneliness from longing, until distinctions that previously seemed self-evident acquired a permeability I could neither explain nor reverse.

Even now I find myself hesitating before certain memories, not because they are especially painful but because they appear to contain information I remain unable to decode, moments that seemed insignificant while they were occurring yet continue exerting pressure years later, returning unexpectedly during conversations, while reading, while writing, while performing entirely unrelated tasks, carrying with them the persistent suggestion that I overlooked something essential, though what exactly remains elusive, and perhaps the most disorienting aspect of all of this has been the gradual realization that my search for understanding may itself have become part of the thing I was attempting to understand, that the act of pursuing explanation altered the shape of the experience being examined, creating a situation in which every effort to step outside the loop merely generated another turn within it.

And because each apparent breakthrough eventually revealed itself as another beginning, because every arrival concealed a further distance, because every interpretation carried within it the seeds of its own undoing, I have become increasingly uncertain whether the experience I once called liminality referred to a location at all, or whether it described something far more difficult to recognize while inhabiting it, namely the condition of remaining suspended between competing realities without fully belonging to either, all the while maintaining the conviction that understanding remains just ahead, waiting somewhere beyond the next insight, beyond the next memory, beyond the next attempt to articulate what happened, never noticing that the horizon has been retreating at precisely the same pace as the pursuit.