The Liminal Week
Things We Once Adored
AI Gen Process/Software: Human, Perchance.org, OS: Linux (Ubuntu 25.10)
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Text to Image Prompt (https://perchance.org/ai-text-to-image-generator): A Christmas tree tossed to the curb in an industrial setting, Joliet, Illinois, 1967 (my hometown/year of birth), in the Blue hour, dawn or dusk, after a light snow or ice storm. No people.
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[Verse 1]
The tinsel bleeds its silver rust
onto the carpet nobody vacuums
Days have no names here
just the color of leftover gravy
[Verse 2]
I wore pajamas to the curb
Saw three dead trees stacked like bodies
The playground swings hang frozen
No children for miles and miles
[Chorus]
Time holds its breath holds its breath
The week dissolves dissolves dissolves
Time holds its breath holds its breath
Between the old year and the next
[Verse 3]
Blue hour stretches into blue hour
Transit station echoes with no footsteps
Ornaments crack like eggshells underfoot
The angel on the mantle lost her face
[Verse 4]
Candlewax hardens in odd shapes
The ecclesiastical feeling drains away
Now it’s just intercalary nothing
A week unclaimed by any calendar saint
[Chorus]
Time holds its breath holds its breath
The week dissolves dissolves dissolves
Time holds its breath holds its breath
Between the old year and the next
[Bridge]
[Distortion builds]
Melting ice sculptures in reverse
Everything suspended in formaldehyde light
The world exhales but doesn’t inhale
Stuck in the space where nothing claims you
[Outro]
[Guitar feedback fades]
Betwixt betwixt betwixt
The decorations leak their colors
Betwixt betwixt betwixt
[Instrumental Coda]
The Liminal Week
No one can ever say exactly when it begins.
It does not arrive with ceremony. There is no bell, no announcement. Christmas ends not with a period but with a smudge. One morning the lights are still up, but the meaning has drained out of them. The tree remains in the corner, shedding needles like it is quietly undoing itself. The radio stops playing carols. The calendar loosens its grip.
Time holds its breath.
Outside, the street looks like it has been paused by an unseen hand. Snowbanks sag, half-melted, neither winter nor memory. The air smells faintly of pine and cold exhaust. Someone down the block has already dragged their Christmas tree to the curb. It lies there on its side, netting still wrapped tight, as if it has been restrained rather than discarded.
It is strange how quickly devotion turns into disposal.
Only weeks ago, that tree was chosen with care. Fingers tested branches. Someone argued for fuller needles, for height, for symmetry. It was lifted, positioned, lit. It stood witness to laughter, to arguments, to silence that felt companionable. For a time, it was madly loved. Now it waits for a truck that will not remember it.
This is the week that forgets names.
Days are referred to only as “yesterday” or “not yet.” Pajamas become a form of civic dress. Emails remain unanswered without consequence. The world exhales but does not inhale. The future exists, but it does not demand anything. The past is close enough to touch, but already cooling. Time is a ghost.
At dawn, the playground stands empty, swings frozen mid-arc, as if children vanished mid-sentence. Footprints lead nowhere. A single mitten lies near the slide, half-buried, its owner untraceable. The school doors are locked, but the lights inside hum softly, keeping vigil for no one.
Blue hour stretches longer than it should. Or clocks lie.
The woman walks to the curb with her coffee, steam curling into the air like a thought she does not finish. She studies the trees lined up along the street. Some still sparkle faintly with tinsel. One wears a crooked star, stubbornly refusing to fall off. They look less like refuse than like witnesses, unceremoniously abandoned after having served a purpose that no longer applies, no longer exists.
She thinks of other things she once loved this way.
Things that were chosen, decorated, defended. Things that became furniture. Then obstacles. Then something to be moved aside when the season shifted. There was never a moment where love turned into indifference. Only a quiet slide, unnoticed until the Goddamned curb appeared.
The liminal week does not judge. It simply reveals.
At the transit station, no trains arrive. The platform echoes with its own emptiness. A departure board flickers, undecided. Somewhere beneath the concrete, machinery hums, ready but unused. Movement implied, suspended. The Dolemitic Limestone architecture waits patiently, built to be passed through, never meant to be inhabited. Like so much of life.
Even belief feels temporary here.
Candlewax hardens in odd, fossilized shapes. The ecclesiastical weight of the holiday drains away, leaving only smoke-stained air and the faint impression that something holy was once present but got out of Dodge the instant it could. The angel on the mantel has lost her face. No one remembers when it happened.
This week belongs to no saint. No god claims it. No productivity system wants it. It is intercalary. Inserted. A pocket of time that exists only because systems require seams.
And seams, once noticed, cannot be unseen.
Late at night, the woman drives past a shopping center downtown, along the river. The holiday hours sign still hangs in the window, curling at the corners. Inside, chairs are stacked. The desire engine is powered down. Wet pavement reflects a single flickering light. An automatic door slides open for no one, then closes again, embarrassed. Fooled by nothing.
Evidence without actors.
She feels it then, clearly. Life itself is a series of weeks like this. Thresholds disguised as routines. Loves we carry inside, decorate, defend, then eventually place at the curb when their season ends. Not because they meant nothing, but because time insists on movement, even when we resist.
The tragedy is not that we let go.
It is that we forget how fiercely we once chose.
The liminal week asks nothing of her except to notice. To stand in the Blue light’s place in linear time. To honor the pause. To remember that even discarded trees once held lights, once held breathless silence, once stood at the center of a room where people believed, if only briefly, that they were whole.
They lied.
They always lie.
Tomorrow, the calendar will reassert itself. Resolutions will be made. Intention will return, sharp and demanding. The trucks will come for the trees.
But for now, time holds its breath.
And in that held space, everything still matters in the Blue light.