The Subconscious Hideout

When I was a kid, one day I had read in my Science book about a windmill. I didn't quite understand the importance of a windmill that day. A few days later, my Science teacher tried to explain in the best possible way to rather curious 6-year olds what it is supposed to do. There must have been a picture of a windmill that I remember with four blades and an old structure on which they were mounted. As a child I was fascinated by the thought that those blades could generate energy merely by rotating with the wind. They seemed bound yet free to move or as I thought whirl and fly.

So a few days later, when we were asked to draw a picture of a windmill, I drew an old wooden structure with four blades but I concentrated more on the surroundings. Because the windmill fascinated me with the thought of being one and only in a vast space with just the wind to talk to and listening to the sky at other times. I remember that I painted my windmill surrounded by grass on one side and an ocean on the other side. Years went by and I forgot the details of everything else about that class but that image of my windmill remained with me.

Subconsciously, whenever I thought of a windmill, I was transported to a blurred vision of that grassy shore. For reasons I could never understand, the fascination with that childhood windmill grew and it became my psychological hideout. Along the years that I grew up, whenever I experienced emotional lows or highs, I thought of that place which existed in my imagination, finding peace near that windmill sitting on the grass watching the vast ocean, looking for answers that troubled me, wondering about questions that haunted me or sharing the torments of my heart with that place, as if it were listening to me. Whenever I looked inside myself, I found that my dreams, visions and promises felt hopeful when I thought of that place.

I never found the exact place in reality. Even when I saw windmills in real life, they were different but brought back those blurred visions. But the image remains. So whenever I think of that windmill now, I realize that I made it an epitome of peace, victory, comfort, solitude and freedom for myself. It became my psychological home, and I keep visiting it to talk to myself under the shade of those blades, sitting on the grass, the sea wind waving in my face and being myself in another transported world, and no matter which place I think about from my childhood in nostalgia, in the end that place will be my hideout.