Vanishing Stores

Looking out the window of the bus as it travelled up Enmore Road I saw signs in the window of Marie Louise salon. This was a new window display, the kind that I dread appearing in any place that I love.

Almost every other store along Enmore Road has changed over the last twenty years, but there was something eternal-seeming about Marie Louise, like it was a jewel that was set into Enmore Road so tightly that it would always be there.

There’s a particular kind of sadness that comes with knowing a place you love may soon disappear. I’ve felt it for many places, from seeing houses I once lived in surrounded by fencing, awaiting demolition, to seeing Development Application signs go up on the fences of favourite buildings. It’s the sadness of bumping up against time, where time isn’t days and hours so much as shifts and changes. It’s the sadness of things in the process of disappearing.

It would have always been a shock for me to see Marie Louise for sale, but it was even more so as a few weeks earlier another of the “memorial stores” I wrote about in a previous post had signs in the window.

First Mrs Koles’ window had a “Leasing” sign in it, and then a few days later, a tarpaulin was hung up over the camera store, and another “Leasing” sign appeared. I peeked through the window behind the tarpaulin and saw that the store had been cleared. Only the cabinets remained, emptied of their cameras and expired film. The other store also had bare shelves, apart from a lone sign wishing me a Merry Christmas, and the white cash register, marooned in the centre of the counter.

Cities change constantly, and places disappear no matter how significant they might be to me or to anyone else. Some places might feel like they are a part of me, but then signs go up in their windows, or they disappear without trace, and I’m reminded that they don’t belong to me after all, at least not in a physical sense.

Other businesses will replace Marie Louise or Koles, their pink and yellow exteriors might be painted over and their signs removed, but, at least for me, they will never truly disappear. I imagine these places that have persisted despite everything changing around them existing in a kind of constellation, dots here and there across Sydney. This constellation overlaps with another one, a fainter constellation, of places that once were. I let both constellations guide me.

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