Feel so alive in the mall after dark.
Escalators on pause, headed nowhere.
Fifteen again, on a forced, awkward date,
sneaking into an R-rated movie.
Popcorn fingers starting to learn
how it feels, what it means to hold hands.
A girl rests her head on a boy’s skinny shoulder
as a superhero dies on the screen.
—
At once, every baby in the Food Court starts to cry from its stroller. The mall becomes an operatic nightmare of screams without reason and second-hand smells of Panda Express. From the hours of 8am - 8pm, tall fluorescent buildings hold masses of people on a quest for more things. Conversations overlap, lights flicker, Bears are Built, metal detectors beep, movie theaters buzz with Blockbuster hits.
I am interested in the quiet after the chaos dies down. When the janitors soak their mops with soap. When the silver caged bars cover each shopfront. When the shoppers go home with all their new things, for a moment, they will feel new too. I like when we are the last to ones to leave. I'm interested in those vacant afters. I find that often, they are the most abundant parts.
There is something exhilarating about finding yourself alone in a typically crowded space. It’s as if you are being let in on something that no one was supposed to see. “Non-places” are areas of transience where people remain anonymous, like a busy airport, where you wait to fly away, or Times Square, where a billboard blurs your face. Then, there are “liminal spaces.” Liminal space imagery depicts the “in-betweens” of life, such as empty stairwells, hotel hallways, any space that feels abandoned. The silhouette of an energy that once thrived, but now, everything sits still.
–
Many of my social happenings as a self-unassured pre-teen were set in a self-unassured place: The Barton Creek Mall, my local suburb’s shopping mall that was certainly a carbon-copy of your local suburb’s shopping mall. I reflect upon these pimpled, confused years of “my mom will drop us off if yours can pick us up,” and I don’t resonate with or quite understand my early adolescent self – but I’d like to try. There must be some poetry, or at least some psychology, in the universal experience of roaming towards nothing for hours on end. We were the small-town wanderers, desperate trend chasers, hopeless identity seekers, drunk off of pink Starbucks frappuccinos.
Why did we all choose the mall?
It was something to do. A place to park our awkward bodies. Somewhere to get lost and gossip. The ages of 12-15 resemble something similar, the “non-place” of coming of age. The mall was a playground for middle-school politics. I wonder what we talked about, what we were looking for, what we were walking towards. Trips to the mall remained a constant through puberty, it grew up with us, and us with it.
My most vivid memory of the Barton Creek Mall is not sitting in the furniture section of Macy’s, strolling through the makeshift bedrooms, fake kitchens, sitting in the staged living rooms, testing out the rows of tempur pedic mattresses that all begged the question: Which mattress will hold us the way we need to be held? It wasn’t at Claire's getting my first piercing, a diamond stud shot from a gun into my small, unkissed ear, which would then get infected once, infected again, then close itself up entirely. My most visceral memory isn’t even when a Bungee Jumping Trampoline was planted in the mall’s back corridor, when I strapped into the harness and jumped, and jumped, and jumped until my own momentum soared beneath me, and I was airborne, doing backflips, and all of the bodies and name brands and questions about my place in this world turned to small and inconsequential nothings, harmless speckles of dust in a much greater picture, where I could finally see families, first loves, first jobs, and what appeared to be a bird’s nest in the corner of the wide industrial ceiling.
When I think of my neighborhood’s Barton Creek Mall, I will always remember the birds. There were always birds trapped in the building, either slapping their feathered bodies against the skylight, or flying unapologetically, getting all caught up in people’s hair. A pigeon, a starling, and a grackle fly into a mall, and suddenly everyone is broken from their trance, ducking and bobbing and swerving the birds’ ruthless orbit. Equally stuck and out of place, dreaming of somewhere vast and open. Somewhere vacant, painted a beautiful blue.