Mall Kid
memory/delusions/suburbia
I love the mall, which is no surprise given that I am a New Jersey bitch. I love being able to oscillate from a department store to Hot Topic to a pretzel stand. It is absolute heaven for me. This should be embarrassing for me to admit so publicly, being that I am staunchly against capitalism and the mall is somewhat of a love letter to Adam Smith himself. However, there is something so equalizing about going to the mall as primarily a window shopper. Something deeply freeing in licking honey mustard off my fingertips in a public space, then digging those same paws into a pair of overpriced panties, holding the item against my hips while looking into a mirror and wondering if I have scooped up the correct size and, instead of committing to a purchase, tossing it back into a pile of its fellow panties.
The mall doesn’t beg for commitment. It does however, demand your desire. It requires you to exist in a liminal space where the wandering enables the performance. You must be able to imagine all the possibilities- what it would feel like to order the full plate of chicken you just sampled from the Panda Express, how your ass would look in a thong with the word PINK splashed across your vulva, catching your crush purchasing you a band t-shirt for your birthday. The mall holds the first place I could physically envision a story being played out. It is the birth of fiction in action for me. Of course, my first instance of fiction is through books and music which are, I think, more traditional forms of storytelling. But the mall is where I got to see it all happen just not to or for me. It seemed like it was happening for everyone else and I was merely a witness, a background character paid nothing but I was happy to have had the experience under my belt so I could be prepared for when it was my time.
To be a spectator is not something I take lightly. I enjoy logging the details of these everyday experiences. I watched mothers purchase their daughters expensive dresses to wear to Bat Mitzvahs. I saw first kisses in the food court. I dug through buckets of bracelets while hearing friends get first piercings at a Claire’s. In hindsight, I may have been a somewhat creepy tween but at the time, I was yearning. I wanted so badly to experience. And I wanted so badly for those experiences to carry meaning.
Recently, I have had to grapple with the hard truth that most people don’t carry any strong feelings towards you. Most people move within the realm of neutrality towards you. Neutrality is fucking uncomfortable though. Being hated gives me direction, being a nobody leaves me in a space where I have to create and believe my own truth. Even people who once held love or deep disdain for me may in fact have completely moved on into a scarier place: forgetting my dumbass even exists. I have done that to people. Some days I suddenly remember people who I was close with in 2010 and rather than feel the need to reconnect, I reminisce to myself for a moment then quickly move on with my day. I now yearn for things beyond that, I suppose.
What? You thought I was going to say and now I no longer yearn? That now because I understand I am but a fleck in someone’s life story I understand that desire creates self importance in a narcissistic way that overshadows the truth of how things actually occurred in real time? That moments that were big to me may not even be worthy memories of other people? Wrong!!! What has been significant to me remains just as such, but I am trying to no longer rely on reciprocation.
I can be shaped by these small moments that barely hold a flame to people. I think about the mall a lot. How it was a pressure cooker for so many of my desires. One of the malls I frequented during high school had a movie theater in it. We would all meet up and eat at TGI Fridays and then go to the movies hoping to see our crushes. I watched boys sit shoulder to shoulder with my friends. Then we would all run around after the movie, hopped up on caramel swirl drinks from Starbucks, chicken tenders, and popcorn, until someone’s mom would pick us up. My body would be exhausted from the animalistic flirting I would do with both my friends and their suitors. Prancing around hoping someone would turn to me and decide my manic ass was the object of desire, not the girl in front of them with the wispy hair and calm demeanor. No, I would think, they definitely think it’s sexy I am a teen girl acting like a god damn muppet. I would go home and lay in bed and listen to my Discman I decorated with whiteout and stickers. Loudly in my headphones something dramatic and sweet, songs in desperation about being seen, about hating my body but loving you, whoever you are.
Most of these people are married by now with babies. I don’t doubt these memories perform differently for them, and I don’t doubt that they still yearn too in a much different way. I like to think we still think about the mall in all its iterations we experienced. Maybe the mall where the escalator to upstairs was a direct pathway from the cookie cake stand to the Delia’s, my Mecca. Or maybe the King of Prussia mall that had the Betsy Johnson store I used all my saved up money from working at a kids gym to buy my pink prom dress that was so ugly in comparison to my peers, it got me romantically rejected from my date. Or the mall with the movie theater where I pretended to like The Dark Knight. The mall, while yes, is a source of capitalism, the place where money must be hemorrhaged in order to sustain, is where things I had read in books, listened to in songs, watched in movies became acted out clumsily in real life. Where I saw things with my eyes and let them become bigger and bigger in my brain until I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I had to put it somewhere. It spilled out of me in jokes and song and dance and now it continues to do so in my day to day, whether that be in my writing or giving me a slap-across-the-face type reality check that things aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes it is just another day at the mall.