I went to the elevator and stood right where he stood, the same non-committal vantage from which he averted his gaze towards me. The sheer indifference of his demeanour, the frosty aloofness of the tilt of his head, and the callous gait were laden with symbolic meanings that I struggled to understand. So, I stood inside the elevator again as my final act of empathy to grasp what he tried to communicate and embody that ill-fated day.
His effortless indifference felt like an assault. While he acknowledged those around him, he chose not to see me in that space of proximity where I sought some tacit reassurance. A reassurance based on a night of sharing, where I was most vulnerable yet most alive in my act of surrender, establishing an intimacy I then felt was so nuanced that the subsequent imagery of his aloofness seemed jarring. I was deeply hurt and baffled at the injustice, an injustice that would remain unrecognised, unidentified and unexpressed.
I stood at the threshold of the elevator, betwixt and between my social and personal self. While the former had to remain a coherent entity, in harmony and a state of correct synchronisation with the world, the latter was crumbling with angst and despair. Abandoned so unceremoniously, I now felt like a “misfit’ in the world of the sensible. My hurt could no longer be articulated or supported by my environment, and of all the unsolicited advice I received, the callous “move on,” seemed obtuse to my pain.
The experience of incommunicable embodied pain, it is argued in this article, has a potent liminal quality to it. The term liminal symbolises the undefined territory between the ‘objective being’ that lacks self-consciousness and whose essence can be determined by public reason and causality; and the ‘subjective being’ which exists purely as self-consciousness and is not bound by public reason or causality.
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