The point is to put the mind to summer. It’s no use lying in a hammock under the fig tree if your boss is busy looking for a better job or arguing with a family member. If the mind jumps like a frog, renting the hammock is a useless expense. Then a friend explains to me a creative visualization technique, very cheap. It’s about building an imaginary house, to enter when you feel anxious or stressed.
My friend’s CI is on the coast of Almeria. He built it with his eyes closed, a bargain. You enter it by a glass spiral staircase (it came out that way, he doesn’t know why), the rooms are large and bright, and he has put a large window in the living room, facing the sea, to see reddish sunsets that widen the heart It has access to a private cove. My friend emphasizes that she has taken a small cove (it can be as big as she wants) so as not to hoard the coast.
His mental abode seems idyllic, despite the fact that he got confused with the measurements of the kitchen and had to put the washing machine in the hall. You have to be careful when building a CI, because apparently there is no going back. Due to some lapsicoempresa rule, reforms are not allowed. If you get a cramped bedroom and you don’t like the bed, you hold on. Imagination cannot think of everything.
I tell my friend that in my CI’s bedroom there would be a bathtub with spring water and a grand piano, at the foot of the huge bed. But I’m worried about the ban on renovations and I don’t decide to build it. I know that inside me there is an architect full of doubts, which could trap me in a labyrinthine and dangerous CI. Who assures me, moreover, that my house will not be filled with ghosts, false memories, psychoarnamas, parasites, murky fears?
I see myself running through narrow corridors and I tell my friend that she better invite me to hers. She looks at me doubtfully: she doesn’t know if you can take people to a CI. It’s a gathering place (he’s come to call it “my sanctuary”), it’s not about having parties there. I tell him we can pick up together. “I don’t see it clearly – he mumbles – I have to check.” I don’t ask who, imagination is very personal.
That night, in bed, when I close my eyes, I visualize the glass spiral staircase. An irrepressible temptation leads me to slide down those translucent steps. Barefoot, I enter this alien CI. There is a breath-taking silence. An excess of natural light that dazzles. In the bedroom, the bed is unmade. I lie down for a while and I’m hungry. In search of the kitchen, I trip over the washing machine in the hallway and stifle a scream. A few heads of red prawn rest on a plate, my friend is not indulging in any luxury. I wonder if she didn’t wash the dishes because she had to run out for something. I whisper his name, in vain. I doubt whether to suck a shrimp head or not. I sit on the sofa, in front of the window, and steal the vision of a spectacular red sunset. And I continue here.
