A warm wall of hot air hits me in the face as I step through the door I just held up for a seemingly never-ending stream of people.

"What are these people doing here? Don't they have jobs?" my inner monologue goes on before concluding that the same is true of me. Yet here I am on a sunny Monday at 3 p.m., about to step into an institution said to be long dead: the mall. 

As a teenager, malls were a meeting place I never entirely understood. In that regard, my evolution as a person is thoroughly lacking, as I'm nowhere closer to comprehending the appeal of spending more time than necessary in these temples of consumption.

Back then, the cool kids would go there, especially those girls who'd claim that shopping was their hobby — a hobby I couldn't afford nor appreciate — still don't, with the exception of shopping for books in cute little bookstores. These cool girls would try on clothes their pocket money couldn't afford, look longingly at the Pandora arm bracelet charms, and consume copious amounts of Bubble tea; that was a thing back then.

Driven by the sugar high, they might either challenge each other to steal small items or try and attempt flirting with a cute passerby in what always seemed more glamorous in the imagination, its emotional impact only matched by the awkwardness of the act.

Now equipped with two more decades of life experience, I still don't feel enticed to visit them, even if their feature of having lots of shops in one place is hailed as a great advantage. Maybe it's the lack of oxygen, the lack of daylight, the soundscape of malls, the ambiance of commodity fetishism seeping through. Maybe it's the mix of all the smells, an invisible attack overwhelming your olfactory senses.

As I walked through today, I thought about all that and how, at least, unlike people's now prime mode of consumption, malls allow you to touch and try things before committing. You're forced to face other human beings either on the staircase or when they come in the form of an over-motivated sales staff in the cosmetics aisle trying to sell you a $100 moisturizer, which, and I quote: "works miracles to prevent aging."

I got news for her, the only way to prevent aging is to die.

I didn't say that. I kindly declined, not without mentally calculating the price of my entire skincare routine, which came out to less than $100.

That might not be the most relatable experience but haven't we all once — intoxicated by the consumerism seeping into our pores — entered a shop, confidently and sovereignly picked a bunch of times, and then... backed out the last second when we realized that we had misread the price, and one item would be our monthly salary quadrupled.

With abashed feelings, you try to keep face as the shop staff keeps up the facade of a smile, but we all know they know, and that's that.

I hear people don't feel shame like that anymore these days, so that, too, might be a thing of the past. Or, thanks to credit cards and buy now, pay later schemes, people won't walk out but just make use of the newly gained rights to indebt themselves beyond forgiveness.

As usual, when I put it onto myself to walk through this sensory overload indoor temple, I was on a mission: reaching the supermarket in its basement, which unfortunately requires walking through half of the complex.

As I tried to carve my path through the leisurely strolling masses, I realized a guy intently looking at me as he approached. So I did as teenage me had always aspired to but never managed: reciprocated that gaze and when an acknowledging smile appeared on his face, I too smiled back at him.

If my life was a Hollywood movie, this would be a point of falling in love at first sight. My life is more of a European film, though, where things are real and, at best, tragic-comic.

This dialogue without words ended as quickly as it began when I descended the staircase.

I'll never know the others' stories or their names. Still, as a human-interaction-deprived remote worker, I cherish even small nonverbal interactions like that, especially on a day when I just jumped from TG chat to TG chat, seemingly accomplishing nothing at all except feeling horrible, my professional career devoid of impact.

It's nice to be seen like that—maybe even nicer than all the flame emojis people send in reaction to a selfie. You took 100 attempts to get the angle perfect and then added a filter to further improve the aesthetic before uploading it to your story. It feels more real.

They didn't get you from your best angle - just how you were at that moment.

Of course, it doesn't have to be some handsome guy walking past. It can also be a cute grandma chatting you up to ask about the way to get someplace (I seem to attract these), a cashier who just has to vent about a previous customer to offloaded some stress, or a ferry driver joking around about how you get the VIP package as the only passenger on board.

Somewhere, I read that even such small interactions with strangers go a long way in making us feel less alone in the world—a part of something else. Maybe the remains of the interconnectedness the human race built its empire on.

Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody… Plurality is the law of the earth.

Hannah Arendt

Thanks for reading 💚

I think part of the reason I feel sympathetic to shop staff, resulting in me letting them advertise fancy stuff I don't need to, is that I, too, once was a floor staff.

I worked at Calzedonia as a shop staff full-time for a few months when living in Tokyo, and it's not necessarily a job that's fun all the time nor satisfying for a brain person like me.

You face constant boredom, yet you are expected to look happy and be in a great mood whenever a customer walks in.

You're on your legs 8 hours a day. And you have to memorize the location of a shit ton of items spread across shop floors, all the shortcuts on the cash register, how to deal with the people who get duty-free, and the size conversions for different bra sizes. Oh and then there's the thing of hitting your sales quota that's pretty high every day... mostly by selling fairly cheap socks.

Anyway, it was still a great experience to have. Maybe I'll write about it some other day.

So long,

Don't buy their "never tearing tights." It's a lie. Mine tore the second I put them on. 😼