Ever-since my dad dropped me in Kindergarten for the first time, I had wanted nothing more than to be done with school for good, to exit those hallways for the last time and move on to the next big chapter of my life. I had almost marked the days on my mental calendar, crossing out the months as the demands and the difficulty of my grades increased, hoping for it to be over with. But once the day actually came? When the bell really did ring for the final time and I was to exit the double doors of a building that had seen me grown into a fully-realized young adult? I just couldn't do it. It should have been a celebration. It should have felt like a reward for all that effort... but instead it felt like punishment. I was lost, lonely, and without any idea what to do next. Freeing myself from the routine that had so thoroughly defined most of my life up to that point didn't feel like a step forward, it felt like stumbling. My first realization as an adult was the bitter understanding that I had spent my first decade and-a-half of life craving freedom without realizing that I had been as free as I could ever be, and those days were behind me now.
It wouldn't have been so bad if adulthood hadn't taken a sledgehammer to my friend group (both online and offline). Luna was gone. So were Karen, Sofia, Alexander, and even Donut; a friend I had recently reconnected with. Our new lives had just scattered us to the wind as the new chapters began in earnest, a future full of plans and possibilities that didn't allow us to look back even for a second. Worse still, it was as if we were casting the remnants of old selves into the fire just to begin anew: MSN Messenger accounts, once the site of some amazingly intense late-night debates and downright warfare on board games were abandoned, discarded like unwanted mail as their owners created new ones, professional-sounding ones that would one day be featured on business cards and LinkedIn profiles -- "SnowlessWinter", "PsyThoughts" and "D0NuTTry" would never log on again, their cringey bios and strange profile pictures left as reminders of the people who used them. Even our forums and other online hangouts were abandoned overnight, having no time or energy to keep up with that routine, either.
Our favorite place had a widget that allowed anyone who visited a profile to quickly gauge who this person was through some sliders that showcased how active and engaged they were, and it was nothing short of agonizing seeing so many names I had read with admiration over the years get their bars depleted day-by-day as they simply failed to return. Soon enough the place was taken over by a new generation, insolent users who didn't respect seniority and acted like we didn't belong. It was a site aimed at teenagers, after all, and we simply weren't anymore.
However... the thing about friendship is that the true ones never really die. They pause, get stopped, exist in their own universe in which time has no meaning and any spark can resume them in an instant.
I was walking through the mall, carrying a stack of nearly-empty papers that were supposed to represent who I was as a person, leaving those CVs, those declarations of how green and inexperienced I was on any store that looked remotely like they'd be interested in hiring an 18-year-old whose best experience up to that point was handing flyers for a restaurant that had since closed. I truly had no idea what I was doing... and then I saw her.
I still have both of our game cards in my wallet, miniature "time machines" to simpler moments.
Moving from aisle to aisle like she owned the place, scanning halls with sharp eyes that saw too much while giving away too little, and just generally being the text definition of "confidence".
I cast a glance her way.
She returned it.
Then we both stood there, trying to figure out who this random stranger who looked so familiar was, attempting to place the face, to put a name on the person who had just caught our mutual attention. But we couldn't just do that, because we hadn't seen each other in more than a decade at that point, so we circled each other slowly and deliberately, like two boxers who couldn't decide which one was to throw the first punch. Then, one of us muttered a name that had long been forgotten. Time stopped, and then we embraced like all those years of absence had meant absolutely nothing. Indeed, I had just been reunited with my old LEGO-building, Nintendo-playing partner, and one of my oldest friends and allies: My cousin, H.
I hadn't seen H since the day my dad picked me up from her house to buy a SEGA Genesis Model 1, our relationship being victim of a family in-fighting that left us in the middle of the crossfire and forbade us from seeing each other, our own opinions and feelings be dammed.
Months later, as we sat on her bedroom and took turns extracting what a deaf alien would be able to describe as "music" from her bass, she would confess just how badly the separation had hurt. How much of an effort it took to hide her pain and misery whenever classmates would talk about hanging out with their cousins or going to family get-togethers. But in those artificially-lit hallways of a mall that we had both gone to for different reasons, none of that mattered. We both had a turmoil that needed to be dealt with, and we both clung on to each other to weather that storm.
Wanna have a successful business aimed at kids? Paint your pillars like candy cane! It works remarkably well.
After token questions and pleasantries had been exchanged (we basically speedran catching up), H took a look at the stack of papers tucked under my arm and promptly let out a laugh I would come to love and hate at the same time. She wasn't mocking me. She was mocking the absurdity of the situation, the fact that I had exactly a zero percent chance of getting hired with my credentials at the time, being forced to carve my way into the world despite being fresh out of school and having no traceable experience to speak of. Without another word she took me by the arm and led me to the arcade, a place that I had loved as a kid but that I hadn't really visited at all since turning 12.
I tried to protest, to tell her that I was supposed to be job-hunting, and that I really couldn't afford to buy a card to play, since I had lost mine years ago. But she just smirked, dug into her pocket and got her own card out, then directed me to an old favorite: a really amazing cabinet with an opening below the screen and a football tied to a rope just in front of it. It was an amazing game that I loved to play as a kid and which combined you kicking the physical ball into the machine for it to calculate where it had landed (and how strongly) to see if the virtual goalie would stop it. It was an astonishingly addicting game, and I just couldn't stop myself from playing, even though I knew I shouldn't.
If you were to tell me that this tiny girl sporting a perfect French braid and wearing tight jeans and spotless sneakers would be an absolute demon, kicking that ball like Roberto Carlos, I wouldn't have believed you. But she was super intense about it, and actually beat me time and again at the game. Gone was the polite, sweet little girl who would take it easy on Super Mario Bros and other Nintendo games just to be nice. This one was, in her own words, "in it to win it". And I couldn't help but admiring her confidence and the importance she placed on this meaningless thing.
By the time we were done, we were both sweaty, exhausted... and happy. And because we were so happy, I only kinda minded when she grabbed my remaining CVs and threw them into the trash, to be mixed with half-eaten burgers and random junk that found its way to that disgusting wastebasket. I learned quite a few things about my cousin that day, and perhaps the most important one was that she was going to make up for lost time, no matter the lengths she would have to travel in order to do so.
Even though I was beyond worried about the future (and my non-existent job prospects), this re-ignited friendship kept me afloat and actually gave me some much-needed meaning at a time when I had completely lost my bearings. I often found myself sitting on my cousin's bedroom, flip phone in hand and hoodie all the way up, passing the devise back-and-forth as we unloaded our deepest, darkest secrets on to unsent text messages that were destroyed as soon as we stopped reading them. We would dim the lights and talk about life like we hadn't just spent a decade apart, complaining about our situation and planning for a future that was full of question marks, except for one: we were in it together.
We only half-jokingly referred to this place as "Mini-Vegas", I'm sure you can see why.
She would also show me her hauls, treasures she had accumulated over years as a mallrat, incredible finds that people just forgot in the frantic, neon-lit hallways and stores. She once pulled an electric blue Walkman in mint condition from her bookshelf and showed it to me -- "the crown jewel of my collection", she said, and it was a mesmerizing thing indeed. The fact that someone had been careless enough to not only leave that thing behind, but also to never even ask for it on the lost objects was beyond shocking to me at the time, since my own Walkman was barely clinging to life and couldn't be replaced. She also showed me a tin box that had once been full of European cigars (and, according to her, still had half its contents when she first spotted it) and, of course, a golden Zippo that she had found on the ground while loitering around the parking lot, looking for trouble and treasure with the same sharp eyes that had her locating me on a literal crowd. Both the tin and the Zippo would eventually make it to my own collection, tokens of appreciation from the Queen of the Mallrats herself, a title I had given her out of genuine respect (and a bit of mockery) for her ability to just take in details and opportunities in a place designed to inhibit both things through the sheer magnitude and overwhelming size of its dazzling advertisement and "eternal noon" vibes. She once advised me to throw away my compass (not that I had one), because it didn't work there. She was unbelievably right.
For a couple of magical months afterwards, that was our whole routine, even after I had finally gotten a hell job (hello, fast food!). I'd show up to her house, hang out in her room, then cut my meager paycheck just to keep supporting our arcade-induced mania. She'd pay for the bus fare and the food, I'd pay for the actual games and whatever random fun we wanted to have after burning our retinas with the incessantly sharp and bright screens of the many games we played. And once we were done with that, we would scout the food courts, hallways and even the parking lot in an endless search for abandoned loot (sometimes settling for wolfing down discarded McDonald's food, because stinginess knows no pride and we were both young and borderline broke, so it was only fair and just slightly stupid). At one point we even took to searching the "bones" of an endangered species -- getting our hands into the payphones just to see if anyone had forgotten a quarter or two in there. It was dumb, and so great... especially when we actually pocketed a coin that way. I'm sure mall security already had a file with our names and faces on it, because we were THAT active in the place.
It couldn't last forever, though. Time always has other plans.
I like to think of time as the universe's "rebel force": it moves when all we want is for it to stay frozen. It drags on as we desperately beg for it to move on and turn pain into healing. It doesn't even afford us the courtesy of telling us how much of it we have left, leaving us adrift in a sea of sand and sun that can cease to exist without warning. It's such a cruel thing that it even mocks our feeble attempts at harnessing it, making it so no two clocks in the world can even agree on what time it is, despite both being right. Time doesn't build, it only wrecks... and we were running out of this infinite, finite substance.
For all her awesomeness and give-no-crap attitude, my cousin was skating on thin ice. Her grades were a disaster, she was getting dangerously close to dropping out entirely, and I was being singled out as an enabler to her "self-destructive" behavior. We were banned from seeing each other by the same people who had destroyed our relationship as kids, and this time we just didn't accept it. We continued to see each other for a while, wasting away at arcade cabinets and pool tables. Doing idiotic things like playing Whack-A-Mole barehanded just to avoid paying for the hammer (I BEYOND don't recommend that; it's a miracle I didn't break my damn hand) and competing in endless Street Fighter II matches, laughing our heads off as my random, manic button inputs would result in the best combos imaginable. We would also play such an aggressive version of pool that the people handing out the equipment for it just flat-out refused to let us borrow it anymore, after one too many balls had to be fished from behind neighboring tables because of the way we played the game. It actually reminded me of the episode of "Get Smart" in which Max had to infiltrate a KAOS hideout by showing off his mastery of the sport, only to end up destroying table after table with his signature clumsiness. Except that this time it wasn't a script, we were really that savage.
There's a famous saying that goes: "one man's trash is another man's treasure", and I couldn't agree more. This is just neat.
We were never officially given the boot, but it was clear that we weren't exactly "welcome" there anymore, either. Something had shifted and our high spending (at least on credits to keep playing the games) was outweighed by the chaos we caused as we openly cursed and played aggressively, turning every thing we tackled into a fierce competition. Once we were actually told off by a mother because we had just raced each other in Daytona USA and started trading profanities just for a quick laugh. We totally deserved to be stopped like that, but I'm just glad the Queen didn't raise to the challenge as she usually did, otherwise I'm sure we would have been banned on the spot.
The final blow came a few months later, after I had called her for one of our daily chats. The voice who picked up the phone on the other end of the line was almost unrecognizable to me: strained, angry, even hurt: we had been pushing it, and her parents weren't letting that slide anymore. Her grades had slipped further, she had failed a crucial test, and there were enormous reports of truancy being unearthed (I claim no wrongdoing on that account, since I could only see her after work). Her parents had cornered her after that last round of failed exams and given her options: either she got her s*** together or she got a job. She chose the latter, and was soon job-hunting herself, the irony of that too obvious to remark (I also hadn't yet lost the will to live, so I wasn't about to mock her for pulling a complete reversal of our first encounter. You just don't tease a piranha, and I didn't want to, either).
My cousin got a job... handing flyers (of course), but then developed a really good work ethic and kept climbing, moving on to better and better jobs as her skills improved, and she found a knack for customer service and inventory management, skills she didn't even know she had but that she was a natural at. Unfortunately, that meant that her reign was over, that her crown was up for grabs, and that our misadventures were drawing to a close as the age of malls itself faced the final curtain.
The last time we were together in the mall, it wasn't to terrorize it or even to enjoy it... we were there on "official businesses", buying Mother's Day gifts like the responsible adults we were.
Even though life has taken us to radically different places in the decades that followed that chance encounter at the mall, I once again discovered that it just didn't matter. It didn't matter when were kids seeing each other for the last time as family drama robbed us of all the laughs that should have been ours, and it doesn't matter now. Our pictures and recordings from that time may be gone, forever trapped in dead phones and flimsy storage mediums that can't stand the ceaseless march of the clocks, but our memories remain intact. It's funny, really... after robbing me blind for years, the universe finally decided to throw me a nickel that Summer day at the crowded mall: I desperately needed a friend, and it gave me a long-lost sister.
And because she was there, I could keep moving on when I felt rooted in place by circumstances beyond my control, all whilst the electronic sights and sounds of the mall and the arcade bid farewell to the last of my carefree days. And maybe that's how you truly say goodbye: by saying hello again.
Last edited:
