Life in the Interstitial
it's 3:00AM, do you know where your Dad joke is?
I was find I am drawn towards interstitial spaces, those awkward bits of land that don't seem to fit the jigsaw puzzle illusion of this modern Life. There seems to be extra stitches here and there that don't quite fit anywhere.
This peculiar concentration has been with me from the start you can see it in parking lots little clumps of Earth and cement grass but no one really seems to "own", magic-paper-wise, and therefore nobody gets around to mowing or watering till some poor City bureaucrat sends out a mowing crew who are playing the theme to The A-Team through a set of plastic kazoos.
I got a fancy as a kid that one could just _be_ in interstitial spaces, and indeed people _are_ in those spaces; more often than not, however, it's not by their choice. Unseen, unwashed, uncared for, interstitial people are un-people, spilling over the edges of society's maps, filling interstitial causeways with mass and energy, a perpetual social brownian motion limbo.
There but for the grace of God, amiright?
Would that there was some Neverwhere for the interstitial denizens to wander into and have magical adventures, but magic like that is not available in the Midwest—how could it be with a past made up of dried paleolithic seabed that aches under the weight and strain of modernity's industry and financial calculation?
Locally it is 3:00 a.m., the witching hour, and it is the time I am most prone to have thoughts about the state of interstitial-ality, for if a place can be interstitial, so too can a time. Stitches of threadbare memories, aching and curling under the electric arc lamp of my noggin fat. There's rent to be paid, along with bills, and it's almost Father's Day, for whatever that means.
Remembering our fathers...how can you not when you live in hip-deep in patriarchy? They're fucking everywhere, and likely they're why the map has all these spaces that don't make any goddam sense...if we had quilters running things there wouldn't be gaps in the fabric. How cozy would that be? Apologies to any quilting father's out there. I'm sure you're doing the most.
But now 3:13 a.m. and I am thinking of ghosts and interstitial time, and of weight and of gravity and of photographs, matter is energy, and Mass and gravity and the fabric of spacetime bend and move and dance with each other, and perhaps if something leaves enough energy in a strange--interstitial--way, that it gets left behind, locked in an in-between-ness that isn't accounted for in the Official Reckoning.
And we walk by or drive by or somehow pass by, and our gut tells us something is a little bit off about a place, the map doesn't quite fit the territory, and something Extra is occupying. It might not even know it's there, what with having no respite, no communication, with the space outside its own in-between domain.
But now it is 3:23 a.m. and my interstitial window is drawing to a close. Life is for the living, regardless of what the living get up to, though I can't help but think what might come from having maps that pay a little closer attention to the territory and are drawn with a more sensitive hand, compasses calibrated with more truth, orienteering lessons more thought out, and what that might mean for future wandering souls.
