I went to the mall to get a gift card. I stayed for the feelings.

My cousin needed a Free People gift card. This seemed like the simplest errand on a list of errands. Go to the mall. Buy the card. Leave.

Malls have this effect on me where I walk in meaning to do one thing and end up twenty minutes later holding a candle I did not plan to buy, trying to remember where I parked.

Free People is, genuinely, a good store. The clothes are the kind you put on in the fitting room and immediately understand how you are supposed to feel in them: soft, vaguely Californian, like someone who owns crystals unironically and also has good bone structure. Whether they feel like that three washes later is a separate question. The gift card was the right call.

But walking through that part of the mall sent me back, involuntarily, to Hollister.

Not the Hollister that exists now, which I assume has made some adjustments. The Hollister of 2003 or 2004 or whenever it was, which was a sensory experience I cannot fully explain to someone who was not inside it. The entrance was a cloud of what I can only describe as institutional beach body spray, deployed at a volume that made you feel like you were passing through customs into a different climate zone. Once inside, the lighting was so dim that you could not see the clothes. Not metaphorically. You could not, with your human eyes, distinguish one item from another.

The shopping strategy, as a result, was to buy what you could see from outside. The mannequins in the window were the whole catalog. I bought multiple things because they were on the mannequin and I could see them. Anything that required going deeper into the store was a risk I mostly did not take.

Free People is well lit. The staff can find things. The gift card works online and in all their stores, which is the correct answer to giving someone a gift when you do not know exactly what they want but you know exactly the kind of thing they want.

My cousin texted me a photo of what she got. A cream linen something, in good light. She looked like she had been somewhere warm.