Eighteen months later, more or less…

That day I arrived early in the morning. I had an appointment scheduled for first thing and I like to be punctual. It was the first time I was going there. I didn’t know anyone there. No one had recommended that place to me. I had simply chosen it at random. Ah, randomness! At that moment, it didn’t even occur to me to think of that word. Does randomness exist? Do things sometimes happen just by chance? Is that how everything works?

Upon entering, I found a young woman behind the counter. She was a girl about ten or fifteen years younger than me. Of slight build with straight black hair. Almost immediately, her strangely expressive way of looking caught my attention.

‘Hello, I have an appointment at ten thirty’ I said. ‘My name is Roberto.’

‘Is this your first time here?’, she asked me.

‘That’s right.’

‘Please fill out this form, thank you. Have a seat and you will be attended to shortly’, she said.

I sat down in one of the chairs of the small area that had been set up as a waiting room, which was located just to the right of the reception desk. As I filled out the information, I wondered to myself if I looked old enough for them to address me as ‘sir.’ When I finished, I got up and went back to her.

‘Here you go.’

Minutes later, they called me. The person who was going to attend to me at first was a kind of supervisor. A woman in her fifties, with brown hair, slender, and with one of those huge smiles that hang permanently on her face. She had a good teaching ability and explained clearly what this would consist of. She explained things very well. But she spoke a lot. Perhaps too much. Fortunately for me, they weren’t going to charge me by the hour.

The supervisor kindly asked me to accompany her. I followed her to another empty room and there I waited for a couple of minutes. Then the young woman from reception entered and closed the door. And I will never forget what happened to me next.

There I sat, while that girl did her work, keeping my thoughts occupied and my gaze lost. But at one specific moment, I crossed her gaze with mine. The depth of her eyes pierced me, and an immense sense of peace flowed through my being.

‘This girl has something truly special in her eyes and in the way she looks,’ I said to myself.

In reality, I don’t know if words are enough to describe what I felt. I don’t think so. An immense inner peace. It was like entering a different existential stadium. As if my soul finally rested in a place detached from everything around me. As if, in a very brief moment, the whole world stopped dead, and during that instant, I could feel that I needed nothing. Naturally, that poor girl was completely unaware of what was happening to me. But the fact is that it was so beautiful… It was such a lovely and beautiful feeling that I didn’t want to stop looking at her. Just like that, I didn’t want to stop looking at her. It was truly pleasant. And then I realized what was happening; I would end up making that poor girl feel uncomfortable with me. I couldn’t keep looking at her like that.

After a while, when we finished the session, I left. The truth is that at that moment I would have stayed there with her. I didn’t feel the slightest physical attraction towards her. It wasn’t about that. I didn’t look at her with that intention. I didn’t have that desire. It was something completely different. It was simply like having found a bubble of inner peace in a world I didn’t want to leave.

And I left there with a strange feeling of happiness. But at no point did I think again about that girl or what had happened that morning.

Everything happened on that very day. It was still very warm at night. After dinner, I went out for a walk. I sat down to have a coffee on the terrace of the bar I usually go to out of habit. There were very few people. I noticed a table where three women were chatting and drinking animatedly. I focused on one of them because I found her very attractive. She had really beautiful eyes.

I sat for over an hour, throwing curious glances at her while she returned them with the same interest. But it was Thursday night and it was late. When I got up to pay the bill, I passed by her on purpose and sent her one last glance. She returned it. I left there with a certain pleasant feeling, so finally, I decided to take another little walk before going to sleep until the next day.

I didn’t think again about what had happened to me in the morning at any moment. As if it had disappeared from my memory. When I got to bed it was around one in the morning. The window was open, the blinds raised, and I could see the glow of a beautiful moon. I fell asleep thinking about the woman from the bar…

Magic…

Suddenly, I saw that my Adorable Torment was there with me. There were more people, but I couldn’t see well who they were. We were in an empty street. I could see that it was a street with a slight slope leading down to a kind of lonely road. I approached the house on the left. It was a single-story house, I would almost say rectangular in shape. It was new, with large barred windows, and a small landing before the entrance that was protected by a railing of columns. There was the mailbox and the doorbell. The house was inhabited by someone named Aby.

It took me months, no, wait! it took me years to come to understand the reason behind the annoying name of this dream, Aby. But who or what was it? It made no sense. But a dream never does. With time and attention, you eventually discover that dreams, when they are messages from above, contain certain patterns. They are symbolic and intense, moving like a slow-motion film, and at least for me, they overflow with beauty. But the most relevant thing is that these dreams are filled with tiny details of immense importance. ‘Aby’ turned out to be a word from archaic English, predating the 12th century, meaning ‘to suffer a grief for…’; the etymology of the term referred to ‘obtaining something at the cost of suffering, or redeeming, or paying a fine.’ At that moment, I still didn’t know it, but I had just received the first warning, ‘there is no salvation without suffering.’

I ran across the street heading towards my Adorable Torment and the other people.

‘But I can’t move here! Someone lives in this house!’ I shouted.

Then they left, and I was left completely alone. The sloping street turned into a square. It was a closed square, with only one entrance. Surrounding the square were several multi-story buildings. Five or six, perhaps. And all the ground floors were entertainment venues, bars, restaurants, cafés, and various pubs. Almost surprisingly, the square began to fill with people. They chatted and hugged each other animatedly, like in a long-awaited reunion of those who haven’t seen each other in years. I could hear them speaking in various languages, but I didn’t quite understand what they were saying. Even so, I remained entirely alone, because all those people were there completely oblivious to me. And then I started to feel the song…

That song had always held a special meaning for me. Special and sad. It wasn’t a song from my musical heritage. It’s one of those songs that romantics like me, the eternally lovestruck fools, carry within. And we don’t tell anyone because it seems too sentimental. When I listened to it, I felt a special emotion inside. For me, it evoked what is often called true love. But it also made me feel very sad, and in a certain way, somewhat miserable. Because the truth is that for twenty-five years, I was never able to connect the emotion that song stirred in me with the lady I married. And that is very sad.

There I was, feeling completely alone in the middle of a square full of unfamiliar people, as I began to hear everywhere ‘Can’t take my eyes off you’ by Gloria Gaynor.

Suddenly, time and space seemed to fold and completely disappear. And for a moment or an eternity, I don’t know, I felt completely united. Connected. Unity. Wholeness. Oneness. I was experiencing the greatest, most fantastic, and indescribable experience of my entire life.

I looked around me searching for the source of the music, and there I saw a girl dancing to the rhythm of the melody. She was beautiful, radiant, and full of life. As she danced, I could observe her outline in great detail. Her entire figure. She was dressed in white. And she was pregnant. For a moment, I came to believe she was dancing for me. But who was she?

And then, after one of those movements, in one of her dance turns, I looked up and saw her smiling at me. That smile in her eyes projected Light. Her gaze conveyed all her happiness, infecting me with it. That girl was the same young woman I had been with that morning in that place.

And just at that moment, I woke up. And that night I discovered Magic. The genuine kind.

That same night, I debuted my logbook. What had just happened to me was so sublime that I knew I had to note down every single detail of this event.

It was as if Heaven was rolling out a red carpet to show me the path of my life.

It’s this way!

And I would never again have to distract myself from the path. Who would want to be distracted from such experiences? For a long time, I wanted to imagine that if, on the other side, up there, what awaits us is what I could feel and experience in that dream, I have nothing to fear down here anymore. Because there is nothing comparable. In fifty years, I have never experienced and felt what I felt that night. It seemed like another impossibility, another nonsense.

Months later, I was going to meet a Princess who would help me understand it.

‘That dream you’ve experienced is called a «peak experience»,’ he will tell me.

A complete and absolute connection. A mystical and unrepeatable experience. The gateway to self-realization.

The thing is… ‘If self-actualization turns out to be an attainable state of perfection, isn’t it true that self-deception is a condition of permanent limitation?’

So, are we spending our lives lying to ourselves and that’s why we can’t lift our feet off the ground?

It’s going to turn out that the idiot is not me…

That night it was almost three in the morning. I was confused and immensely happy. I couldn’t believe what had just happened to me. In reality, I wanted to fall back asleep. I wanted to keep dreaming. I would have liked to stay there with her forever. And to be honest, this dream was also causing something in me that I didn’t expect, who was that girl? Why did I have to dream of her?