As I was walking through an almost eeriely quiet mall this afternoon, two days before Christmas, I couldn't help but feel that Christmas is a time of so many paradoxes. It is a time of both hope and despair, a time of yearning for peace while waging war, a time of extravagant displays of wealth and heart-breaking portraits of poverty, a time for believing in magic and a time for losing one's faith in everything. This once thriving suburban mall was once filled with shoppers and stores of every kind. Today, almost half of the stores are shuttered and there were scarcely any shoppers on a day that is supposedly one of the busiest of the season.
The economy is supposedly growing, but it is not evident here. I wonder what happened to the people who worked in these stores and the people who owned them. Did they move on to other things or have their lives become as dark and empty as the stores where they once worked.
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