Memoirs and Musings

Subdued

Walking down the fluorescent-lit corridor at 2:45 PM, that stretch of hallway toward the hospital’s forgotten tail, where Thanatos was hidden and Eros was found in sterile plastic. It was an abyss of a sort, an area of limbo leading to that end where surrender and structured disorder arise. This is where time collapses and contorts in rigid waves. Stepping into that angular stretch, I stared down in search of purification: the sacred in mortal walls. The air carried a faint sweetness. Of undoing. Decay. Flesh.

I knew that something would unspool tonight. It always does. There is always a subtle loosening of symmetry, of breath as if the geometry of the body has grown tired of holding itself together. Something ancient would rearrange itself molecule by molecule. Enmeshed in spirals of medical gaze, I am transformed into the labyrinth itself. Me flowing as an extinguishing angel with decrepit human bodies and monitors.

I was allowed to linger at the trembling of sacred proportions without apology. To study it, to move with it. That permission intoxicated me. There, the veil was permanently thin, a witness to strange composure and brutality through complications and conflict and bodily surrender to medicine, protocol, daily rituals. Just temporarily, within the confine of those 8 hours, I had permission to be obsessive, a socially acceptable way of being obsessive. Constant movement: I felt myself a quiet wheel turning within the vast rhythm of a machine I can barely grasp. Into the unknown, searching through labyrinths in my mind while I walked bleary down that bright hallway in search of a glucometer.

Mall as Machine of Desire: A Deleuzian Take on Valley Fair

"...many days spent walking through Valley Fair Mall alone, in search of meaning inside something as familiar and readily available to me as consumerism. Recently, I stepped into a high-end department store on a fall evening and I felt the air change. It was colder, perfumed, suspended. Outside, time moved in the sunset. Inside, time dissolved into escalators and polished marble. I stopped trying to resist it. Instead, I entered it, imagining I was in a metaphysical realm of brands radiating soft emotional pulls, bodies inside a circuitry, and escalators channeling hypnotic movement."—me, from a fragment written in my journal on 12/11/25

I have always felt cynical about shopping malls for most of my life. I saw them as hollow bourgeois spectacles: overstimulated by that concoction of smells, people, and stimuli. I'd scoff at the Instagram-friendly boba shops and the forgettable restaurants. Yet there is a profound alienation about the mall that appeals to me immensely. The way the mall does everything it can to modify human behavior. No longer animal, but transcended into pure capital necessity. I found a way to enter the mall differently, to embrace it and transcend its boundaries. I now experience it as a dreamlike identity experiment. I dissolve, temporarily, into the materialism surrounding me.

What I saw that evening was a constellation of human bodies wandering, consuming, drifting. Architectural channels that guided and captured movement, corporate brands exerting affective pulls, forming a functioning machine of desire. Through each step I took in the mall's corridors, through the food court and up the escalator, past another "Coming 2026" sign, I felt the flow of capital (transactions, credit, data) passing through each storefront. My mind in a zen-like state, I let the desire emanating from displays and advertisements wash over me. I people-watched: seeing other bodies circulating along escalators, corridors, trendy storefronts and pop marts. I observed the way the mall redirected and intensified the human body to accumulate into absolute consumption. I decided to walk into Aritzia for the first time in my life, something that I never imagined I would partake in. I laid my hand on their famous Slouch Coat and found myself lost in a micro-garden wired inside a larger ecosystem. The lighting was warm enough to soften my gaze in the enormous mirror. The bass-boosted pop music pulsed low and restrained. I was left in an intoxicated consumer daydream state in a way the store wanted me to, because I also wanted to. I could not help but slip into a quiet, trance-like state of wanting. I no longer resisted.

I knew I had become a component plugged into the mall: my gaze, my movement, my attention, my credit card all becoming machinic parts.

I feel that Valley fair is particularly special compared to other shopping malls in my area in its ability to make me enter a trance. Great mall and Eastridge barely fool me, their clothing and shops feel so tacky, ugly, and outdated that imagining any sort of "possible becoming" is impossible. Valley Fair instead has a luxe and hyperreal artificial interior that doesn't tell me who to be, but instead saturates me with possible becomings. What I mean by this is that the moment I enter the mall, I have left ordinary life to enter a climate-controlled, timeless interior. My identity dissolves, and I then re-attach to new identities through possibilities: “I wear this,” “I could look like that,” "I belong to this lifestyle.” It was purposely and meticulously designed to be this way. Each purchase reterritorializes me into a coded consumer position. I feel this strongly when I shop at a perfumed corporate space or a high-end department store. I can physically feel the modern space of the mall modulating my behavior softly. It is continuous but not necessarily oppressive. More like an ambient form of control that is mild, seductive, and omnipresent. Some stores feel seductive; but others feel hostile and surveillant, such as Bloomingdale's and Byredo. The control that these two shops thrust onto me was less ambient and more forceful, making it dreadful and alienating. I felt so surveilled in there as if a camera were following me from the ceiling, my every movement being gazed upon.

I find an eerie excitement in understanding how my consciousness is being shaped while it is happening. On lonely weekdays, I observe myself becoming someone under lighting and scent at Valley Fair. I look in the fitting room mirror and am offered infinite drafts of possible selves, hanging on chrome racks under controlled light. Identity feels attachable, almost purchasable, and I can vividly picture in my mind's eye the aesthetic possibilities of what life could become. I desire desire. The sensation of wanting, of discovering my potential selves shimmering beyond shiny glass.