This post was submitted by corey

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My weekend routine.

It’s either here or the art museum. This being a long weekend, I did both. The museum yesterday, the mall today.

I came for the cinema, but arrived two hours early to read and walk. A mistake, given my intent not to make any purchases.

Last week, at a life-changing sale at Saks, I had seen my disposable income for the month of January come and go. I had walked out of the store with a Burberry trench coat, a new credit card, a man’s phone number, and a self-imposed directive not to shop again until spring.

Why do I come here, I wonder, to this magical land called Cherry Creek, to this haute hideaway of Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, and Hermes? Perhaps it is the same reason I go to the museum – because I love beautiful things. Not only the paintings on the walls or the shoes on display, but the men (and occasionally women) who catch my eye. As a coworker once put it, regarding a shopping trip I took just to browse, “There is certainly plenty at the mall for you to look at.”

But the thrill is not just to see – it is to be seen. There are times one fails to exist without the other.

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The children are abandoned at the indoor playground. The men are abandoned in front of flat screens showing the game. Seeing them huddled here, detached from their credit cards but not their masculinity, I can’t help but laugh.

Meanwhile, the women shop.

Women in religious scarves, reminding me of my time in Dubai and the ladies for whom malls offered an escape from the heat.

Women in knee-high boots, reminding me that in Colorado heat is rarely the problem.

Women with $500 bags and $30 Adidas sweatpants, reminding me of the fallibility of even the highest plateaus of our society.

Women who refuse to be defined by one label, and who instead seek them out by the dozen. And me, the observed, at once above and below it all.

~ ~ ~

Yesterday at the art museum, somewhere between the British portraits and the Bamboo room, I became struck by the way we label artists: just their name, their nationality, and their years alive.

“French, 1826 – 1884”

“Dutch, 1598 – 1647”

“Brazilian, Born 1963”

Of all the things with which we choose to identify the creators of universal works, it is the place of their birth and the moments of their life. Staring into one man’s vision of hell, I was acutely aware of how little I knew of him, despite how keenly he had shared his perceptions of the human race’s greatest fears.

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Maybe nothing is timeless. Not the Chanel suits at which my eyes linger. Not the stigma on my credit report of opening yet another Mastercard. Not the bodies of the models in the storefront windows, or the bodies of the model-like men I glance at through them.

And maybe not even ideas. Be we godly or godless, perhaps we all are reduced to a place and a time that all too quickly pass.

My coffee is finished. The light from the windows high above depletes.

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