Too Clean

The first thing I noticed was that the food places were on the entrance floor. At the time, this seemed unusual enough to mention. Shopping malls had already created their own grammar in my head, and this one had moved one part of the sentence.

Upstairs there was a balcony where people could smoke and eat, which mattered more to me then than it would later. The non-smoking tables also had enough space between them that you did not feel involved in the next table’s conversation. I liked that.

I did not like the cinema.

I no longer remember why.

That missing reason does not bother me. Old memories do not need to become professional reviews simply because time has passed. Sometimes the judgment survives after the evidence disappears.

There was also a toy shop, which I somehow considered worth recording. Then came the toilets.

They were extremely clean, or at least they smelled as if someone had tried to clean them beyond the limits of human tolerance. The cleaning chemicals were so strong that I thought I might faint.

That smell is the detail that kept the place alive.

Years later, stores change, cinemas change, smoking rules change, and the layout may no longer be exactly as I remember it. But a building can remain in memory through something much smaller than architecture.

Food downstairs.

A balcony upstairs.

Tables with room around them.

A cinema I disliked for a reason I lost.

And toilets so clean that cleanliness became another kind of danger.