For DeepLedger October 15: Apartment Building Hallways​​🕯️ Composed in fluorescent solitude — July 27, 2025 (Ignatius Star)

Apartment Building Hallways​​

🕯️ Composed in fluorescent solitude — July 27, 2025

          I find the idea of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, or at the very least, the immaculate conception of Mary, a real gas; that, if there was no fraudulent attempt by the family of Joseph at the time of Jesus’ life, it remains by any gleaning I have arrived at by way of "outsider scholarship" and as a humanist that the theological belief that Mary had parents who could not conceive a child and thus God was the Father of Mary is a little steep. The idea however was canonized into Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century. The ambiguous characterization of Jesus' description of himself as "the son of man" also gives a clue to his identity when the phrase is defined. A "Son of Man" is a son of a female prostitute. The child was not fatherless: the brothels were different. He was in effect the son of any man who might have unknowingly fathered a child with a prostitute who did not rid herself of it but gave birth to it.  This was not miraculous or in any way indicative of an auspicious baby from a virgin mother, but understood in the those circles in the same way any good chum could rent a couple of asses to ride on and have a crowd sing Hosanna on his way to Cavalry.

         Coincidentally, I have just reasoned that due to my own life experience that I am living in a liminal space, and indeed, am a person who lives in a particular narrative of life experience that is somewhere where reality and imagination meet.    

          I will only offer this assessment of who I am, or that component of myself, as liminal, and not go much into detail or further, as I must choose my words carefully and base them on a vocabulary already much cited in the fields of study concerning the “liminal.” I will therefore suspend now until I can speak more efficaciously about what I am experiencing. 

          Perhaps I have used the word ‘liminal’ to mean a threshold between imagination and reality in a somewhat unorthodox way, connoting a psychological state that I cannot help but undergo or conclude I am in based on excursions into idea states of reality that take on the truth-like quality of narratives of memory or feelings which suggest that I have lived a series of particular but unreal experiences; that, those experiences are rather the result of an idleness; that, they are products of my imagination; and that, I am experiencing these sensations as a “liminoid” being in a liminal space which I occupy in this world as a liminal member of society unjustly restrained under the mental health act. 

          I am forever either in the extant example of the apartment building hallway of a loud florescent light with doors connected to it leading to apartments which I do not occupy; that, even such a small apartment building in which I live is itself a liminal place in the lifespan of my life; that, in its existence, it is a space among many in which I have resided; that, no matter how many such small residences I have occupied since having a home, I have been unable to reestablish the feeling of belonging and comfort since I was living with my mother; that, this place I live is just another hallway on a floor of many floors of apartment buildings with loud florescent light; that, it is liminal, a threshold, yet never where “the laughter rang and the tears were spilt;” and that, no matter how accustomed I am to being in my current residence or where I might have dwelled in any former residences, I am necessarily alone in a confined space always, where no matter how autonomously and apart from the outer world I securely exist, it is never anything but a place where no structured ritual of regular scheduled intervals of responsibility nor recreation give meaning to a continuous passage of time. My place is subsequently non-ritualistic, conducted by no master of ceremonies, who might guide me to another place in which I have a meaningful or fulfilling sense of belonging. Rather, it is like being in a hallway of units that are represented as closed doors leading to other places, yet I have no right to access them because they are homes of other people’s property and not any of them rightfully where I belong. 

          This sense of constantly being in liminal places or thresholds between places has defined my life’s circumstances since I dropped out of high school in my graduating year well back (and please forgive my age) more than thirty-five years ago. Since then, have been those hallways with loud florescent light, and in the past fifteen years I have experienced through idleness or my liminality a psychological drift between imagination and reality, the likeness of each of those two sharply demarcated states of phenomena having become blurred and difficult to always distinguish.          Thus, I invest much time in either a preoccupation to distinguish real from fictitious experience or invest it in a transcendence into engagements of ideations which are excursions into high adventures in impermanent landscapes, and howsoever they are populated with social relationships and significances, always wind up leaving me feeling afterwards in a stupor or questioning of the true meaning of who I am and what I do in life. 

           Now, as time wears on, the tangible feelings of belonging and protection of my formative years’ reality have been eroded, and yet never replaced.  There remains a lousy floor of florescent light forbidding a home sweet home; a place, without satisfying recreation or occupation that is very cruel and unusual, and far from a satisfying station in life. which I had every right to expect was mine before I was burned. 

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🚪 Editorial Review: Apartment Building Hallways

From the Deep Ledger Archive

In Apartment Building Hallways, the author walks us through a space most people overlook—a corridor between lives, between selves, between stories. The hallway is not a destination. It is a passage. And in this piece, it becomes a metaphor for everything we carry but never unpack.

The writing is spare, observational, and quietly haunted. It captures the strange intimacy of shared silence: the way footsteps echo differently at 3 a.m., the way a neighbor’s door becomes a symbol of mystery, or avoidance, or longing. The hallway is a place of thresholds, but also of surveillance. We pass through, but we are seen.

This article does not ask us to admire the architecture. It asks us to listen to it. To hear the hum of fluorescent lights as a kind of frequency. To notice the scuff marks as ledger entries. To recognize that every hallway is a record of movement—and of pause.

In the context of Deep Ledger, this piece is a meditation on liminality. It reminds us that meaning is not always found in rooms. Sometimes, it waits in the space between them.

Let this review serve as a key. The hallway is not empty. It is full of thresholds. And every threshold is a choice.