The nook that the brain is

If your brain were a physical space, what would it look like? What do you hear, what do you smell and what do you see?

 In the mists of the mind a big construction emerges. Even wider on the inside, it surprises its spectators with its variety of choices, the majesty of the central hall, the unusual counter desk of the reception. It gives off a very clean, pleasant look. The counter desk, made from homey mahogany wood, brings a little playfulness to its rustic, traditional style, with carved out swirls and snail-like shapes on its corners. A delicate, polished surface of such entrance and an elegant atmosphere of a very well-maintained hotel, helped this magnificent institution hold up to its name. And what a hotel it was indeed.

Offering a home to thousands and thousands of heroes and their journeys, an artistry of no other kind, the stories interwoven in the very founding rocks of this building, love and passion flourished and lived in this space in a mutual symbiosis. In other words, this was a cinema; a cinema like no other.

  Right in the very beginning, there stood the already mentioned central hall with reception. The space was opened and wide, not even an inch of the floor could be seen as everything rested peacefully, unexposed and hidden by a dense, bright red, fleecy carpet. It’s intrusion had no limits, as one couldn’t look somewhere without being exposed to this bright fleecy red. Even the top of reception desk and sides of other furniture were covered in it, in a form of a billiard cloth.

Right from the entrance and before the desk, a couple of neat fluffy sofas occupied the space with another small rustic conference table with snail-like spiralled endings and legs and matching mahogany colour. The sofas too, emitted the same kind of red to match with the overall fancy yet cosy atmosphere of the space. Their corners were rounded, the surface equally fleecy, they seemed a bit old, but you could say they were an old-schooled classic. There was a pile of books carefully arranged in a shell desk with two racks on its hollow open interior. Some visitors liked to sit down and read, perhaps because they were waiting on someone, other times because they did not feel like a movie that night. Though sometimes a loud music or noise from the other halls were so strident, they would fill in the entrance itself too. “That’s normal” would the hostess say. But if it happened too often that it would disturb the free will of the peace to read or choose a movie, the staff would try to quiet down the racket. The books were old and modern, colourful and blend, new and shabby, fiction and non-fiction but all of them taken care of with love by the staff and the visitors. In order to read, the whole place was brightly lit by yellow and white light emitted by tens of small lightbulbs from the ceiling. There stood only one lamp in the sofa corner for better experience, thought rumour has it there are parts of the cinema specifically reserved for re-construction of a library and an old reading space, yet no one confirmed it.

  There was no window in the whole reception, nor in the further corridors of the cinema. Yet the space did not feel dull as everywhere an eye could reach its view there were colourful posters or reviews hanging on the walls. As one would get deeper into a section of a genre, age or even a simple feeling, the halls would get filled by specifics, posters and photoshoots from such movies, scenes, and quotes of those who are kept nearer to the heart or even suggestions and recommendations, placards with the names of stories that are only about to be experienced. And there were thousands of corridors like these! Just from the entrance you could see all the halls opening into this one big room, as if the reception was a sun and corridors its magnificent overwhelming rays, one would feel dizzy just trying to count them all.

  And the staff did all their best to do so and to collect the keys to open each and every room. Keys were all hung upon different small hangers behind the reception counter desk, each one in its own small square-space of mahogany stand, and each key with a number that over-complicated the relevance between the actual location of the room and the place of the key on the wall. Intricate enough to even describe this system, for someone unfamiliar to it, it would seem like a simple hotel-like wall stand for storing keys. Only the smell of pop-corn and the strange closed-in atmosphere pulled out a new visitor from the impression of a hotel.

  Familiar with this system, however, were the hostesses, accompanying the desk. Their hair was always nicely combed tight in a bun, neatly refined dress and they would never forget to display their infectious permanent smile. There was not a single part of their outfit that wouldn’t match, no hair loosened up from the bun, no sleeve too high or too low. They were the pillars holding this whole place together, whenever someone spilled something in a screening room or someone got lost in the halls, they would clean, advise, find, and guide. But not even they knew all the rooms and sections of the theatre. Nor the visitors or staff members were aware of all that lied underneath the tangle of sections, halls and corridors, and it was hard to say for how long a new section has been standing there until it was discovered and opened to the public. Some sections also caved in by natural causes, some were closed down by the staff, but all were equally loved for their impact, and all gave work to careful editors cutting with a deadly precision the film tape for the film.

 

  The whole architecture just fought over the idea if a diversity and colours control the will of organisation and planning or if it’s the diversity and colours that are simply compartments one can choose from, in the meticulously clean system. In either case it was both. A theatre with clear rooms distribution, a nicely tidied facilities, polished furniture and team-structure, a theatre that functioned as a hotel for its visitors, but a theatre that looked like a star-shaped stadium from afar, with plans and halls entangled in the weirdest craziest ways that not rarely even the staff members would stray in that cosy maze of directions, from one room to another.

  In either case it was both, connected by passion and love.

Author's Note

goal of the exercise: try to describe an actual physical space, the metaphor is mainly the space you choose so try not to use too many abstract metaphors for the description itself, give the reader an actual sense and experience of how the place LOOKS like, not just how it feels to you