Thick Places

All I hear is talk of liminal spaces. But what of their staid and silent cousin, their dust-caked aunt-twice-removed, the thick place?

Where liminal spaces are the borderland, thick places are the hinterland.

Where there is potential energy in a liminal space, there is perpetual motion in a thick place.

Where a liminal space hints at transformation, a thick place outright states the roles and forms you will be allotted.

A thick place, unlike the wavy skeins and ragged edges of a liminal place, is impossibly heavy, a gravity well with a heart at the bottom.

If you possess any hint of an impression on you – for example, your family has a murky history linked in some way to the thick place (think industrial accidents, secret agreements, disappearing blood) – then the thickness has already claimed you, and it is just a matter of time before you are drawn into the supplicating crush. However, if you do not fit any of the roles in the performance to come (the investigating officer, the bored out-of-towners, the vagrant) and are unwilling to have your edges sheared away, well, you have two choices – leave, or be removed.

Of course, some claim that a thick place can also be a liminal place, where the weight of history becomes so terrible that cracks begin to show, or in extreme cases, the whole set gives way entirely. Down, down, down. I don’t know anything about that – but then again, who can say what lies beyond an event horizon?