Sometimes I dream about K-Mart.

When I was growing up, K-Mart was the main store for just about everything not food related for my family. When I was very young, around 2 or so, I found a red fishing hat that I fell in love with and insisted on wearing to everywhere. My parents got me a Starscream Transformer toy that I found on a random shelf there.

There were two in the county I grew up in, the one farther from our house had a restaurant in it, towards the middle of the store surrounded by big green curtains. In the late 90s it was moved to the front corner of the store.

We would always stop there after a long day out shopping at places lik the flea market, and the mall, and the various overpriced shopping centers that were increasingly becoming all the rage in those days. The toy sections would always have something I didn't find anywhere else, a curious mediocrity that existed somewhere between the obscure treasures of the flea-market and the popular new products at the mall.

When I got into middle school, it became my primary target for shoplifting.

Now, I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but neither did I grow up poor. My parents got me toys constantly and I was always focused on some new shiny thing in my various unorganized collections. What I didn't have was a lot of control. My parents had always been some brand of abusive despite their best efforts to be kind people, but between their own trauma and their inability to really understand their neurodivergent child, they often were unpredictable, stressed, and prone to losing control. And these habits worsened as I went through middle school, which had a load of trauma on its own.

So sometime in the 7th grade, I started going into the K-Mart, tearing open a random lego set, shoving it in my bag, and walking home. Nobody cared enough to notice that it was the same kid doing it every day around the same time. I eventually did stop, if only because I decided I couldn't be lucky enough to keep getting away with it. Quitting while I was ahead was one of the wisest things I ever did, and the K-Mart was covered in cameras by next autumn.

It was an empowering time, and looking back over my old Egyptian lego sets always brought a feeling of pride to me.

When I was starting high school, I stopped going to the K-Mart as much. It was a little out of the way and I had other interests aside from toys. Though I still did stop by to get the new releases of GI Joes after their relatively brief hiatus in the late 90's.

I think the last time I was in a K-Mart was sometime in the mid-2000s. They hadn't quite gone into a nosedive but their best days were behind them. I found an old Lego Star Wars set of the original cantina shootout on clearance. It's worth a pretty penny now from what I understand, but the figures I got from the set are staples in my Lego city now.

As I mentioned at the start, I often dream about K-Mart. I dream about finding entire neighborhoods within, or living there myself in some kind of secret alcove in the middle of the shelves. Sometimes my house just seems to be out in the open, and I have little to no annoyance at anyone walking through.

They closed both K-Marts in my hometown a few years ago. Sold whatever they could, threw out everything else. It's a sad thing to see it vanish from prominence, but I suppose that's just the way of the world.