Likely due to her intensely analytical nature and her subsequent high-awareness of everyday uncertainty, our mother had a preoccupation with preserved and/or prospective spaces — that is, as a child we spent a lot of time in the stylized vacancies of the home sections of department stores, the roped off rooms of historical mansions and the recreated period rooms of museums. Though we liked these environs immensely, the encounters were rather intense and mystifying — the fertile presence of invisible people, the fake backlit views in the windows, the confusingly hollow appliances, the errant childless doll. To us it felt that, because of either a random, dimensional mishap or a magical, domestic misadventure, someone’s “reality” was forever cursed to be props and stage set.


Equally as often we were dragged to varied women’s clothing departments. This was a different affair, a scenario where we exercised more control. When allowed we would break away to find a particular type of large, circular garment rack and crawl to its center. Cloistered in a quiet ring of fabric, we could sit calmly and unobserved, perfect for contemplating private thoughts — like some sort of contented but apophenic gnome quietly parsing out their weird world in the warm, noiseless hollow of a large trunk.


When small, what is happening can’t really be explained to you; there’s simply insufficient experience, and subsequently, differing languages. Adults should of course try to bridge the gap, as the attempt creates general but important good will (the absence of which makes this sentiment plain), but mostly what takes place is an unclarified impression. An impression that, not dissimilar to those that suffer from conditions like paranoid schizophrenia, where the standard novelties of life get bewilderingly fused to highly specific and unrelated emotions.