The first thing I notice is the echo. There’s nothing in between me and my voice-not for hundreds of feet. Everything eventually bounces back to me, a little less than it was before. The second thing is the stillness. Stillness itself is not a strange or unusual thing. Plenty of things are still-lakes on a calm day, trees, houses, mountains. They don’t move for years and nobody gives it a thought. But this place shouldn’t be still, it should be alive with hundreds of people scurrying from store to store-talking, laughing, yelling. Even on a slow day it has never been this quiet. It is so deafeningly quiet, the sound of my own footsteps startles me as I make my way down the hallway.

It’s dark-or it seems dark anyway. There’s sunlight enough coming down from the giant skylight in the center of the building, but all the lights are out. The energy is out-gone. Even in the sunlight, it’s absence sits like a heavy darkness in each corner. No light. No life. Just a skeleton.

I start walking down the hallway. The floors are scattered with dropped loot and damaged storefronts. I carefully step around broken glass, trampled clothing, and plastic fixtures. Half buried underneath the rubble is a bright pink plastic poster that used to hang in a window. How many people, hours, and discussions went into making that poster just right? In the end, it didn’t matter. It ended up on the floor with the rest of them. I sign of our past, when things were shiny and plastic.

I make my way over to the banister and look down at the floor below. It’s more of the same. Shattered windows, bare shelves, plastic hangers scattered about, loot abandoned or dropped along the hallways. It stretches on down the hallway, in both directions-as far as the eye can see. This place which was once a symbol of prosperity has been stripped bare. It sits here in the sun, cold and hallow waiting for the hustle and bustle to return. But it never will.