Thoughts from a dying mall

Wake up today feeling the vulnerability of winter. Fall leaves falling, leaving me exposed like every year before. Cold air rushing in the change of seasons and time running out, running towards an arbitrary new year, running towards made up deadlines. The ground becomes too stiff to bury old pictures, so I hang onto them in pockets that won’t fit more than half a person. I see my wishes being stripped naked like the orange trees that line the streets in a direction picked with a roll of the dice. Follow the dots blindly walk through indiscriminate gales that threaten to question my loves until I reach a dried out beacon. Every town has one. Jewelry kiosks and outdated clothes. Panda Express and fortune cookies smell like safety, of childhood before seasons and summers playing chess and watching Goosebumps while the knights and rooks took their break. Can’t watch Goosebumps anymore, not since learning monsters are real. Fall has been breaking this place for far too long, stripping the dreams of a common space now crowded out by commercial suburbia. This one’s third floor, closest to a ceiling wide skylight: already shut down, gates down. Second floor fighting to hold onto customers that never make it past the first. If this is trickle-down theory from heaven then hell might be the last safe place. Crack the cookie to read the slip of paper that falls out. That future has already passed:

a mall is meant to be a lively thing

I eat the fortune anyway.