Shopaholic

Shopaholic

By Dorian Herestor

         

A woman walks into a retail shop on a shopping mall.

Her clothes are expensive, brand-named, of good quality, so good in fact that they almost made up for the woman’s obvious lack of taste. Her high-heeled shoes have never seen mud or smut in their entire life. In fact, the value of her hairdo alone could possibly feed a starving family for a month straight. However, the woman’s ostentatious figure is shadowed by the sheer amount of colorful shopping bags and boxes of all sizes that she holds in her skinny arms.

That is not her first store today.

Nevertheless, she stops at the entrance of the shop and stares at the wondrous façade of capitalism: hallways and hallways of hangers bursting by their nails with multicolored clothes, so different from each other but, at heart, all the same, and the mass of people that wonder through them, endlessly searching for something that might catch their eye. The jolly commercial music reaches her ears, accompanied by the sound of pointless conversations and the jingle of cash-registers; the smell of fabrics, leathers, perfumes and cleaning products hits her square in the nose like a sledgehammer, making her feel lightheaded. She, standing still by the store’s entrance, watches the traffic of people and merchandise; those laughs of enjoyment and smiles of temporary happiness; those bright-colored clothes that seem to scream “buy me!”; that organized chaos, and it takes her breath away.

Deep down, she knows that she doesn’t need more clothes, more earrings, more shoes, more anything. She knows that she has debts that she can’t possibly pay, she’s aware that she doesn’t have enough money to buy the cheapest of bracelets. Inside her Prada handbag, her credit card weighs like an anvil. However, she can’t resist its calling. Those commercials that pass on the tube come to her mind, those ads on magazines. She remembers that model on the cover of Vogue magazine, those snakeskin Gucci pumps, that Dior fur coat, that Dolce and Cabana belt, and how much she coveted them. She remembers the feeling of fulfillment that passes through her when she sees those objects in her hands.

It’s inevitable, she is lost.

The woman steps into the shop, and is swallowed head first by the fleeing and superfluous pleasures of the capitalistic world, carrying with her her epic testimony of her previous visits to the other brand-name stores.

Deep down, she knows perfectly well that she is just getting herself into a bigger hole.

And she could not care less.