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Grades level iconsGrade 9
Genre information iconInformational
Resource type iconWriting

No One Can Help You

Yashasa Fluker, Grade 9, 826 New Orleans
A student describes the eeriness of liminal spaces.
About the Author

Yashawa Fluker is stuck in a liminal space. Help!

Liminal spaces can be pictures that make us feel off without any explanation, things that make us feel like we’ve been there before, or places that we feel shouldn’t exist. 

So what is a liminal space? Is it a picture? A feeling? 

Well, it will be my job today to explain what a liminal space is. Liminal spaces recently started to show back up on the Internet. It has taken the Internet by storm. So let’s start from the beginning. 

Liminal spaces normally are portrayed as pictures or paintings. Most liminal spaces make you feel like you’ve been there before but you haven’t. Or they also can be presented as the space between your start and your destination, like hallways that are desolate and look like they could go on forever. An office with no one in there. Or a store with the aisles going on forever. 

Now you’re freaked out because you weren’t supposed to be trapped in the in-between. 

It seems you are forever stuck in a place without time, without purpose. I feel like an image can say a lot with no words at all. In this photograph I took, the viewer can see the ever-closing shadow and darkness. When you see the dwindling amount of light you’re given in a field of shadows, it makes you feel small inside. You’re hungry for the light to help your understanding of what’s around you. The sign attracts your main focus. The sign is quiet yet screams so loud in your face. 

In life, the sign says the sidewalk ends which means the sidewalk is ending. But in liminal spaces, it can mean so much more. Something is ending, and that can strike fear into most people. The lack of context can make them horrified. It could mean the journey you had is closing. And so you’re left alone with no one in sight in an endless void.

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