By Kate M. Wilcox

Liminality: From the Latin root, ‘limen’, meaning threshold.

Entering university, I shuffle at the edge of a threshold. Who I was before and who I want to become hang in the balance. Somehow, impossibly, thousands of us dreamers have made our pilgrimage to this ancient seaside village. We have congregated here, our shared fears and dreams creating an unspoken connection that transcends us as mere individuals. This university is a sanctuary, a microcosm of the world to come. We strive for growth, for transformation, for challenge-teeming electrons caught between pulsating orbits.

In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage.

When was the last time I was around so many people at once? My blood sings and my body shrinks at the proximity, the heat, the familiarity. The brush of shoulders in the library’s silent stairwell sends my thoughts scattering. Was I fluent in this language before? Months of isolation has struck me dumb. Occasionally I make fleeting eye contact, but I cannot hope to read the expression lying beneath the mask.

In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next".

I have spent hours in the library pouring over the theories and construction of liminal spaces. In the end, it all boils down to the same age-old question: how can we create an illusion of control? Chaos is the natural law of the universe, but humans stubbornly insist on order. We conquer and assert, survey and categorize. Do you think we will ever get tired of it? I know I am. I peer down at my textbook’s diagram of Foucault’s Panopticon, a disciplinary concept where prisoners can never know whether or not they are being watched. Around me are masked strangers, sitting precisely two meters away from each other in perfect lines. The sour smell of disinfectant rolls over my senses. I have never felt smaller.

Outside the bus station’s entrance, silvery puddles reflect a yawning, ambivalent sky above. Buses move in a bewildering dance as they pull in and out, the air trembling with their pneumatic groans and hisses. Freshers hover next to weather-beaten bus timetables in a desperate attempt to divine the complex movements. I watch as they board a bus and then just as quickly disembark and board another. The buses are Precision Incarnate in an otherwise absurd world, and for that they have my grudging respect.

The bus speeds through the countryside. The women behind me laugh nervously as we are thrown about, careening down a single lane riddled with potholes. Surrounding us are fields filled with regimented greenhouses, little plastic tarps shielding shy crops from the inhospitable elements. The scene is warped by the condensation clinging to the bus window. Instead of greenhouses I dream of tents, filled with hopeful travellers. They are attempting to grow in a land where they do not belong. Camped along the sides of roads, doing their best to lay strong roots. I send a silent wish of goodwill to them, and close my eyes for the rest of the journey.

When we stumble out of the bus at Leuchars train station, people rush for the cheerful blue and white bridge over the train tracks. I purchase a coffee, and the man behind the counter counts the unfamiliar coins back to me as he gives back the change. Someday I will have the courage to ask him his name. The coffee is an excuse to politely back away from the mingling bodies, to cup its borrowed warmth in both of my hands. From the platform I stare at the barbed wire fences surrounding the British army barracks. The utilitarian architecture is brutal against the rolling fields. There was a hot air balloon squadron of the Royal Engineers based there once. I superimpose balloons into the sky above the train station, and watch as they lazily disappear into the mist.

Something uncoils in my chest as I enter the train. Trains are the liminal space where I most belong. I wear anonymity more comfortably than any identity I have ever known. For the duration of the journey, I could be anyone, leaving somewhere, going anywhere. My posture readjusts, I allow myself to take up more space. I put on my headphones, but no music plays. I observe the world flash by outside: tiny people emerging from tiny houses curving alongside the coastal landscape. All around me is life, synchronised with the rhythm of the pistons and the train’s careful timing.

People are strangers and control is an illusion, but briefly, we are connected.

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