The Mall

Owings Mills Mall, 1990s _{(Credit: Michael Stern)}

2005.

I don’t know what time of day, but sunlight streams through the windows on top of the two story hallways, filled with the excesses of the American markets. The design of everything hasn’t quite outgrown the colorful, plastic aesthetic of the last decade. The world still looks the same, but everything has been different underneath for years.

Inside this mall, a dying temple of a dying era, shoppers’ shoes click clack on French marble floors, a purified fountain gurgling as we move towards the store, scenting the air with the smell of filtered recycled water.

After seemingly spending hours spend wandering the faded and disgusting high traffic carpeted and old tile, we make our way back out to the corridor, towards the food court. I beg my mother for something from a place far too unhealthy for me, but she refuses, saying we’ll be having dinner soon.

If the old, boxy television is to be believed, then in a few years, this is where I’ll spend my time with my friends, running into friends from school or potential dates. Always looking, shopping in our minds but with no money to our name, our purchases will remain imaginary.

These flashes, poorly exposed polaroid pictures, live only in my mind. The mall has been torn down, the world I lived in finally caught up with the changes of reality. But late at night, with music reminiscent of the tinny and faded, watered down top 40 hits filtered through old speakers and echoing in the space too big for what us small creatures need, I can still see a glimpse of this place that was never quite what I saw.

The echoes of a dead artificial reality, cast off for a new age which itself will be cast off, and join the false memories of my childhood.