IV

      Time is very hard on dreamers for they have such expectations of what it will bring. Six months came and gave their blows and the young souls felt uncomfortable change creeping over them. They had always known the threats of the past but these dark shadows of the future surprised them. Failure became a reality. They realised now that, though they could be happy if they were allowed to keep to themselves, the 'real' world had made no place for them.
      In the real world the days were cut into hours by scheduling: getting up, catching trains, going to work, going home and going to bed. Geoffery hated to go to bed. Going to bed was equivalent to getting up, as he so rarely dreamed now, and if he did it was only a premonition of his day at the office. Tiredness became a feeling which overwhelmed him. The air seemed colder. People became obstacles, standing in his way in tube stations, holding him up.
      Geoffery went home not very long after. He couldn't afford the London rent any more. That was what he told everyone. The rent had indeed been more than he wanted to pay. In fact, it was an emotional sacrifice. A sacrifice of his art which had not been able to compete with all the rest of London, which drained away so much of his time in transport and diluted his ideas with its overwhelming number of images, everywhere, confusing his own vision.
      Iseult strove onwards but that felt she carried on more because no alternative offered itself than out of stoicness. She tried to be stoic but usually it made her frown, it was so forced. And when the mindset broke down, as it did quite often, she felt totally bewildered like one hanging from a thread and flailing about miserably.
      The office terrified her. She didn't just dislike going to work in the mornings. She felt a tight knot inside herself as she walked into the office, waiting to be greeted and felt great dismay when her courteous 'good mornings' were returned with nods of heads that did not even veer from their computer screens to greet her eyes. She had tried very hard at the beginning to fit in but realised now that she was simply different from her colleagues, who were so happy to make small talk and bicker over files and stationary. She simply could not engage with that world but would discover herself looking through the great glass window, feeling all alone, while outside silver sun rays lit up the green streaks of cloud and great coloured birds of her own invention wheeled big circles in the sky. The songs had not stopped coming for her but now she hated her songs. It was the song-writing part of herself that would not let her fit in. She refused to write them down - silly little things, only telling her what she already knew - that she was miserable and wanted to run away to fairyland like a small little child. Quite pathetic, she spurned herself.
      No one had heard from Felix in a very long time. It was rumoured that a patron had given him the means to go North and write about the ice tundra. But nobody really knew.