Finding Solace in Fluorescent Lighting
With my eyes closed, I could almost pretend it was sunshine...
Dear reader,
Some notes before today’s journey:
I condemn white supremacy and hate crimes of any form, and I am in solidarity with the AAPI Community.
I learned that Substack (this platform) has bolstered the voices of anti-trans and misogynist individuals. I’m aware, and I condemn this, too.
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I’m so glad you’re here.
I had my first kiss with my first love surrounded by pastel color swatches and wooden paint stirrers. With my eyes closed, I could almost pretend that the heat of the fluorescent lighting was sunshine, and that the metal counter beneath the seat of my jeans was a cool rock by a lakeside, but when I opened my eyes and saw his curly hair framed by a backdrop of stark aisles and linoleum, I remembered, with both delight and dismay, that I was at Walmart.
***
There’s a great deal of people, and maybe you’re one of them, who’ve never stepped foot into a Walmart, nor do they plan to. I get it: There’s a lot of good reasons to hate the place.
But hear me out: The Walmart Supercenter in my hometown of Cobleskill, New York, is the biggest store in the county and the cheapest place to buy everything at once, especially when you need food, school supplies, clothes, toiletries, and farm tools in the same trip (and you live forty-five minutes up the hill).
When you lived all your life in a place like this, and you’re a teenager on the cusp of independence (but still so young, so naive) who’s sick of the barnyards and brittle fields that mapped your youth, there may come a time when you long for the shine and color and art and general zest of urbanity and commercial life. If this time does come, and you do live in a place like Cobleskill, Walmart is the only place in town where you can taste some echo of the world beyond.
I didn’t go with a list or an agenda; in fact, I was the kind of person who went to Walmart for every single reason but to buy something.
My draw to this place, I think, began when I was much younger. My aunt Kathy worked in the two-hour photo department there. She’d wear a white lab coat over a flowery dress that swished around her ankles.
Something about always having my aunt and my mom there made it feel familiar even from the start, and when our photos were finished, Kathy would lay them out on the counter and we’d look at them together, my sister and my mom and Kathy and me, all pointing and laughing at the silly faces of our cousins and uncles and brothers, the highlights of our togetherness preserved in the negatives.
As I got older, the cosmetics aisle became a treasure trove of possibility: a place where I discovered the glosses and glitters I could hide myself beneath. I’ve lost count of how many boxes of hair dye I pulled from those shelves, how many hours I spent browsing palettes and creams and powders, eager to transform myself into the image I thought the world expected me to be.
Yet for all the ways in which Walmart helped me conceal myself, it also let me be myself.
My friends and I often went late at night, parking in the expansive, vacant lot just to sit in the car to be far from our parents. It was a space we could embody our truest expression, which sometimes meant dressing in neon spandex and listening to Cindy Lauper with the sunroof open to the black, frozen sky.
There was no one to tell us whom or how we couldn’t be.
It also leveled the playing field. In a mostly poor, white town—where some parents were lawyers or doctors, but most were working-class people, like car mechanics and construction workers—Walmart was a place everyone shopped. You could always expect to run into your teacher or your friend’s mom or (god forbid) your boyfriend’s dad. There was always the same food on the aisles in the same place. This equality, this certainty, is what brought me solace at a time when everything was changing around me.
In truth, it still does.
The feeling I get at Walmart is unlike the feeling I get in a shopping mall or a thrift store or a farmer’s market, all of which soothe my soul in different ways. I’ve found myself comparing and contrasting other Walmarts to my home store, surveying the floor plan and seeing if I could, after all these years, navigate my way.
Sometimes I’ll turn a corner that looks exactly as it did back then, even though I’m thousands of miles from home, and it brings me back to a moment, a bright flashing memory of a friend doubled over laughing or a crew of us traipsing through the chip aisle at midnight.
Then I remember how much has changed.
These days, I know all the shine of Walmart is just a facade. I know I'd rather be in nature, surrounded by the green of real trees rather than the green of the turf on the televisions set to the same game. I long for the slant of light edging through the mist, not the overhead lights that make my skin burn.
Still, I’m not ashamed to admit that there’s a small piece of me in that place, and that if I were in my hometown on a quiet summer night, and the friends who know me in a way no one else does asked me to go just for old times sake, to wander the aisles like ghosts of who we used to be, I wouldn’t hesitate.