The Warmth of Other Hallways

I remember my first steps in Sciences Po last summer, weaving through dozens of mismatched hallways. I remember the sun dozing lazily on the panes of the glass hallway and the initial confusion of finding myself down an adjacent corridor, leading nowhere.

“We’re lost,” I said, smiling. I glance at my anonymous partner, a stranger encountered just moments before on Place Museux.

“So we are,” comes her grave reply. We backtrack. We retreat. We find new paths to new exciting destinations.

In that moment, the world brimmed with opportunity. All doors were open—you just had to pick the right hallway.

Hallways fascinate me, for their physical attributes as much as for their symbolic meaning. I always conceived phases of my life as a hallway. I navigated high school seeing college as the destination. Exams and essays and interviews—all of it one long, uphill hallway to here. To this moment, curled up in my bed, click-clacking my thoughts instead of studying international law. To these moments: my roommates cracking ridiculous jokes and trying not to laugh. Climbing through our house like a jungle gym. Philosophical debates followed by flopesque cooking attempts. Even the pitter-patter of the Rémois rain on our skylights evokes the comfort of finally having a permanent home, in the space itself as much as in other people.

Now, that home flickers with impermanence. This destination has revealed itself to be more of a hallway than I thought. The spring warmth that hugged us as we stepped out of our exams to enjoy a tranquil tipple reminds us that our time is almost up. There will be new Sciences Pistes next year to take up our relay, and we will move onto far-off hallways with different hallway companions.

Sylvia Plath loved hallways. The limbo space offers a psychological reprieve—a break from the destinations of her life and the baggage they entailed. In transfer, you’re always freer. Even Elizabeth Bishop’s waiting rooms evoke a wistful liminality that allows us to, briefly, escape our corporality.

But these poetic depictions make hallways hostile too. They panic over them. The freedom of having no responsibilities mutates into a new trap of never being fully settled. We’re always stuck in between destinations: youth is a hallway to adulthood, high school to college, college to the job market… The possibility that these phases of life are irrecoverable haunts us. What do we do when they disappear?

Entire relations can be in-betweens too. Hallway relationships may be the most tragic of their kind. We know they are doomed to end and yet foolishly, we dive deep into them—perhaps out of desire, or perhaps because there is value in occupying the hallway. Just because a relationship is destined to expire does not make it less impactful. We can learn in these types of hallways too.

My nostalgia for Sciences Po, its peaks and its downturns, reminds me that ephemerality is beautiful. Beyond that, transience gives value to what we do. These years showed me to seek out the hallways. Spend time in them. Have a falafel on the radiators in them and bask in the sun in them while procrastinating.

Because hallways are not just passages. They are places we stumble through, places we hesitate in. In the hallway, we ultimately find our footing and decide where it is that we want to go. So if you are, like me, feeling the weight of impermanence press on your shoulders, create a home from the hallway. Use it to guide where you dream to be.