The “in betweens”



Ghosts in the Fluorescent Light

Not the golden children. Not the cautionary tales.

Just the ones who show up every day and somehow became part of the furniture.

Welcome to the world of the In-Betweens;

not drowning, not waving, just floating face-up in lukewarm water.

They aren’t brilliant enough to be noticed, nor broken enough to be rescued.

They are the background buffering bar of life, always present, never complete.

The Echo of Mediocrity

The In-Betweens are born in hospital rooms with no drama.

They grow up being told they’re "doing fine", the phrase parents use when they're too tired to hope for more.

School didn't break them. It just forgot them.

At work, they’re dependable. In the same way that a potted plant in the corner is dependable. Always there. Occasionally watered. Rarely appreciated unless dead.

They are those who are neither seen nor avoided. You don't look for them in a crowd, and yet, they're always standing behind you in line. Breathing evenly. Not sighing. Never loud enough to complain.

The Great Grey

The In-Betweens live in the grey zone.

Not the rich black of disaster or the piercing white of triumph.

Just a bland, featureless fog.

No urgent dreams. Just a vague itch. A distant sense that they should be feeling more.

A life spent looking at motivational quotes with the quiet suspicion that none of them apply.

They don’t fall in love. They fall into arrangements.

They don’t break down. They erode.

We Don’t Talk About Them

Society doesn’t write books about the In-Betweens.

There are no Oscar-winning portrayals of the middle manager who eats lunch alone and never quite figures out what he wanted to be.

No podcast episode is dedicated to the woman who almost wrote a novel but had to fix her resume instead.

Even suffering won’t romanticize them — because their pain is dull, repetitive, uncinematic.

They don’t cry in the rain. They just lie awake at 2:00 AM, staring at the ceiling fan and wondering if they turned off the stove. They usually did.

Why It Matters

Here’s the real punchline:

The world runs on the In-Betweens.

They are the grease in the machine.

They sign the forms. They teach the kids. They refill the printer paper when no one’s looking.

And that’s the twist; you only notice them when they vanish.

When they stop replying to emails.

When the light goes out in the hallway and no one replaces the bulb.

When someone says, “Wait… weren’t they always here?”

And no one can quite remember when they left.

Final Transmission from the Middle

So here’s to the In-Betweens:

Not heroes, not villains.

Not headlines, not hashtags.

Just the quiet ones. The ones whose stories never had a beginning, middle, or end.

Only a long, soft stretch of meanwhile.

They are not failing.

But God, they're not winning either.

And that’s the part no one ever warns you about.