The Blackest

I never go shopping on Black Friday. The closest I've been to a Black Friday experience was when my husband and I had to line up really early at Best Buy when the PS3 and Wii came out. Our strategy was divide-and-conquer, meaning we line up early at two different Best Buys to ensure that one of us got the items if the other wasn't lucky enough to get them in one store. Yup, it took a lot of texting to make that work.

But this year, I decided out of the blue to check it out (and yes, Virginia, it was a very bad idea). I even enlisted my husband to be the chauffeur. I could go at it alone but where's the fun in that? He grumbled a little (okay, he grumbled and whined a lot!) and tried to dissuade me from my 'mission'. "It would be too crowded out there. I heard people get trampled on Black Friday. We could get hurt. Did you see the Target ads on TV? People who shop on Black Friday are crazy, I tell you."

Unfortunately, I wasn't deterred. For some maniacal reason, I wanted to know what Black Friday looks like, what kind of shoppers will be there, what merchandise would be popular, even though it was too late to submit a story proposal to my editor about it. But like I said, I was weirdly curious. So I got out my trump card and told my husband: "You still owe me for making me stand online for hours outside Best Buy when it was raining just to get YOUR PS3!"

And the matter was settled.

Of course, to make my Black Friday experience authentic we would have to wake up before 3am to make it to the store before 4am. And this is where the challenge began. I'm not an early riser. So it took a couple of alarms to get me to open my eyes and become aware of my surroundings. Or to even accept that I had to wake up that frigging early. Surprisingly, my husband was already out of the bed. (And here I thought he hated my idea.)

It was freakishly cold and dark outside. It was a time of day that I don't see very often and it threw me off. My brain had a hard time processing. 'Is it night time or day time? Which one is it? Damn it.' We hop in the car and drove as quietly as we could from our driveway, leaving behind a whimpering dog who woke up too early.

"So this is what our neighborhood looks like at three in the morning," I said more to myself. Everything looked still. When we hit the main road we were greeted with a lot of cars. "I bet they're also heading to where we're going," my husband joked. Yup, fellow fools like me, I thought. I didn't count my husband he was just an accessory to this experiment, after all.

We pulled into the nearest mall and saw a full parking garage. Apparently, 3:30 am is already too late for Black Friday shopping. We saw people pushing carts with humongous TVs and big boxes, heading to their cars. One old lady was pushing a cart so full of plastic bags of merchandise, she couldn't see where she was going. "Hubby look, a very rich bag lady," I said. We laughed.

We finally found a parking space and proceeded to the door. The mall opened only one entrance, which was annoying. 'What if there was a fire, then they've trapped people in here like cows to the slaughter,' I thought. What a hedonistic way to go - dying while shopping. I know it was too early to think morbidly but I was irritated at the mall's tactic to restrict the movement of shoppers. Would it make a serious dent in their profits if someone shoplifted a $5 sandwich maker?

We went inside the first retail shop we saw. I didn't have a list of things to buy really. I had some ideas in my head but I didn't have the 'must-get-it-now' feeling. Even the very low price points didn't motivate me to earnestly buy something. On the second floor, we've managed to reach the electronics department since my husband and I saw something in the ad that might be worth getting. We asked around and were told that we had to stand in line.

We followed a line, which was a feat in itself since the tons of people walking on the aisles were 'unconsciously' forming their own lines. To where? I had no idea. Nevertheless, we found the end of the electronics line and waited. I told my husband I want to look at some stuffs and left him to wait.

Crowded was an understatement. And it was a good thing we decided to not get a cart or it would have been a nightmare to navigate the aisles. Every person's grandma, grandpa, mommy, daddy, sister, brother, aunts and uncles all had a cart of their own. Every aisle was in gridlock because of it. Some families even came with baby strollers, too. Why not? The baby was already awake for feeding and diaper changing, so might as well take him or her to do some shopping. That's multitasking for you.

So I avoided the aisles and used the 'back alley,' an area where there was no palettes of on-sale doorbusters. But I found nothing interesting there except maybe a sales associate talking on the walkie in a take-charge attitude and asking if there were still some $2 toasters in the stock room. Several shoppers surrounded her, anxiously waiting and hoping for an answer. 'What if there were none left?' I thought. I shudder at what would happen to her with a crazed mob like that, oh okay, they were not crazed, they just really, REALLY wanted the $2 toaster.

I went back to the hubby who was waiting patiently in line. I asked him if he really wanted the gadget and he just shrugged, "We could just get it online." I agreed. We decided to abandon the line, which hadn't moved a bit when I came back, and went down to the first floor. From the top of the escalator, I could see waves of people below. They look like frenzied ants that found tasty crumbs for the winter.

The retail people were trying to keep things organized in the checkout counters as they herd people in the right direction. 'Like cows to the slaughter,' flashed on my mind. Again. There was only one exit and the way was circuitous and as messed up as the lines upstairs.

But something caught my eye. I pointed to it and my husband grabbed it. "We can't go without a souvenir," I said. "And here I thought I woke up real early for nothing," my husband said with a tinge of sarcasm. I let that one go. He did woke up even earlier than I did for this 'event.' Heh. We found a cart and haul that one merchandise to the register.

While my husband waited in line to pay,  I went to get hot chocolate and some cinnamon pretzels. And yes, you guessed it right I had to line up there, too. As I waited my turn to order, I thought about why I wanted to go in the first place. I know somewhere in my psyche there was a reason. Why in the world would I want to brave Black Friday with nothing to buy? Why in the world would I want to wake up so early for it and jostle with a huge crowd?

I wish I have a clear-cut answer. But what started out as a curious experiment turned into a lesson for me. It was much deeper than a lesson to never go to a Black Friday again. For there in the middle of that line inside a store full of bleary-eyed bargain shoppers, I realized that we wouldn't have been able to do this on a whim if we had Kai with us.

If he was with us, we would be waking up early, not to go to a mall, but to go to his nursery to feed and change him instead. We would be waiting, not in line for the latest gadget, but for him to go back to sleep. We would be greeting the sunrise with black-rimmed eyes from the lack of sleep, not due to early-morning shopping, but due to parenting duties.

Yet just this once I wanted to feel what it was like to wake up before dawn and care for my child. But since I can't have that, I chose to wake up at 3am on Black Friday to catch a glimpse of a somewhat parallel universe. The missing and the loss as acute as the invisible joyous din in the store.

I suppose you might think the whole thing strange. What has America's biggest shopping event got to do with my loss? To waste time going to Black Friday and encounter the materialistic pursuits of people and coming home only to realize that the most precious thing in this world is a beloved son whose life money can never buy or bring back. It was truly the blackest Friday I had in my entire life.