Suspended in the In-Between

There is a particular kind of restlessness that comes with knowing everything is about to change.

I am moving house at the beginning of April. On paper, that sentence is simple, a date, a fact, a logistical event. In practice, it has quietly colonised every corner of my life for the past several weeks. Boxes appear. Lists multiply. My mind runs calculations I never asked it to run: what needs doing, what needs packing, what needs sorting, what needs letting go.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I find myself in limbo.

Limbo is a strange place to live, even temporarily. It is not quite here and not quite there. The old life is still running, the routines, the responsibilities, the familiar walls, but it already feels like a chapter with its ending written. The new life hasn't started yet. It exists only as an idea, a key not yet in hand, a set of rooms not yet inhabited. You are suspended between two versions of yourself, and neither one feels entirely real.

I haven't written here in a couple of weeks. Part of me felt guilty about that, the way you feel guilty about not returning a call, or letting a plant go unwatered for too long. But the truth is, there simply hasn't been space. Not time, exactly, but space. The mental kind. The kind that lets you sit with an idea long enough to turn it into something worth saying.

And yet, and here is what I find quietly funny, I have rarely felt more creative.

There is something about the absence of time that makes the imagination desperate. When there is no room to write, the mind writes anyway. Ideas arrive uninvited while I'm wrapping mugs in newspaper. Half-formed essays surface at two in the morning. Sentences I want to write interrupt conversations I'm supposed to be having. It is almost as though creativity, denied its proper outlet, simply finds the cracks.

I have come to think this is not a coincidence. The in-between is generative precisely because it is uncomfortable. When life is settled and rhythmic, the mind can afford to be idle. But when everything is uncertain, when you are suspended between the known and the unknown, something in you wakes up. You start noticing things more sharply. The way light falls in a room you are about to leave. The particular smell of a place once you've started to pack it away. The version of yourself that lived here, and the question of who you'll be in the next place.

Transitions have a way of making you pay attention.

So I am trying to make peace with the limbo, rather than fight it. I am trying to trust that the ideas accumulating in the margins of this busy, disrupted time will find their way here eventually. That the silence on this page is not absence but accumulation. That sometimes the best thing a writer can do, the best thing any of us can do, is simply live the thing that will later become the writing.

April is coming. The boxes will be lifted. The new rooms will echo and then fill. And somewhere on the other side of all this upheaval, I suspect I will have more to say than I know what to do with.

For now, though, I am in-between. And apparently, that is exactly where I need to be.