I miss malls.
Being a teenager. The mall being this hangout of people from all over town. Dressing up in gothy outfits and hanging out by Hot Topic just to hear what they were playing on the speakers. Running into preppy kids and hippies and stoners and jocks and basic bitch Stacies and giving them the evil eye. The smell of the food court. Guiltily blowing my spending money on big bags of candy and junk food and edgy bullshit. Kids running and screaming and moms chasing them all over those little playgrounds and carousels. Dads handing their kids some change to make a wish with at the fountain. Just loitering at the mall with my friends or my little sisters. Driving there with my sissy and buying cheap crap or just hanging out in the parking lot. Fucking mall ninjas and weebs. Wasting time in gamestop or that sketchy incense store or eating panda express or cinnabon with a shitty plastic fork on a bench. Trying to get handjobs from girls in the parking garage. Seeing your friends from school and from other schools and your teacher with her family there. Running into family and friends there. Socializing. Wasting time.
It's not like the consumerism ever went away. We just stopped hanging out. What happened? It's as though being social died. Subcultures and personal expression died. Hanging out died.
God, what happened?