One night as my mom and I were out shopping she decided she wanted to take a trip down memory lane and visit her old stomping grounds: Valley West Mall. I have hazy memories of visiting the mall when I was younger so I was a little excited, but my mom, a former self-proclaimed “mall rat”, was ecstatic to be able to relive her high school years. At first, we were only going to walk through JC Penney, but then when we were met with the mall entrance we knew we had to journey further into the mall.
As we walked through the once lively concourse we were hit with a wall of dread. A place that was once, in my mom’s words, “poppin” appeared to be deserted on a Saturday night. We were the only people in sight, quickly shifting our moods from excited to melancholy…