The Snow Is Also Soaked

By Stefano Carini

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake, “The marriage of heaven and hell”.

The journey of a young couple across lifetimes.
The power of nature as the binding force for all humanity in a single, collective spiritual being.
A mysterious stone, carrying all pain and illusion of power over centuries, defying comprehension
The presence of joy, spicing the essence of life.

This small work is dedicated to all seekers of truth, those not giving up seeing in daily life the magic which we first met as children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304485434

Book preview

The Snow Is Also Soaked

Stefano Carini

The Snow Is Also Soaked

1st Edition

Copyright © 2024 Stefano Carini

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-304-48543-4

Front cover illustration AI generated from www.canva.com

CHAPTERS

The Snow Is Also Soaked

CHAPTERS

1.Whispering the morning

2.A unicorn in the garden

3.Nothing but love

4.Every shade of your heart

5.Destiny Lake

6.How will I meet you tomorrow

7.True colours through tarnished glasses

8.The sound of your voice

9.How beautiful you are

10.Ride the wild wind

11.Banana office

12.What the sunset said

13.All I have not told you

14.The celebrity’s masquerade

15.On the other side of the morning

16.Quantum foam

Whispering the morning

The sea was lost in a game of shadows, entering, and fading the night just at the beginning of the morning. Undecided, between the eternal anonymity of the night, next only to the cosmic mysteries of faraway stars and the watercolours of the day. And it was there, in that subtle blue line where the sea meets the ocean that all began. That primordial soup of colours, ever-changing roles in the elusive time of the morning. When the sky slowly hands over the key of darkness to the sea and wears the dress of daily light. But all of that had no name. Only colours spread widely over a canvas, whether in a painter’s study or in the realm of memories. Whether in a dream or at the beginning of a new life, where nameless colours are dense with magic wonder and our eyes filled with light. And hours are music, no meaning for the time with its pale blue eyes like the winter we get to know in adult life. That was time to listen to the silence of the morning.

Seize the morning

from its roots

and let it grow

silently,

in the secret

shining grace of dawn.

Let your heart wonder

of the moment,

while existence

speaks in wordless

streams of joy

here and now:

Our souls walking

a heavenly river.

Iseabail was holding the piece of paper in her hands. It was Ian's daily little poem. He used to write one a day for her.

They were sitting by the sea close to a high white cliff to see the sunrise. Stars were giving away to the daylight, with the majesty of the Milky Way’s lights slowly fading into the sky.

Her black long hairs in stark contrast with her deep blue eyes looking at the faint murmur of orange and pink swimming through the silence of the sunrise, just broken by seagulls crying in unknown depths of the cliffs around them.

Those eyes were so deep, as if the power of the sea had been enshrined inside of them by a cosmic power. Or perhaps it was the blue cobalt of the sky above the highest icy clouds. That invisible boundary between us and them, enclosed in the sapphire of her soul.

Ian looked quite different from her and similar at the same time. Tall and thin with a pale complexion and short blond hair that could not reason with any form of hairdresser's care and did seem to take their own direction every day depending on the mood around them. Emerald green eyes, lost in faraway patterns and colours of nature. He was after an invisible line around him, hiding and revealing. Giving and taking at the same time. His hands agile and ready to write, draw and paint like. Tended into an eternal prayer to the world for receiving in colours and images the answer to a question not yet asked.

This was the golden hour of the morning, when dreams you've had at night timidly whisper through the chords of memory before dissolving in the sunrise and getting back to the whitish routine of the clouds wandering the day sky.

‘The thunder struck the house in my dream. My old childhood home with large windows opening on a porch. The thunder struck in the middle of it…so little I remember of what happened after then. It felt like I just landed over my past to the forces of nature. Then, there was no sorrow or surprise in me. Only the feeling of moving on.’

‘I know your home, Ian. We’ve been there and it looks exactly like that,’ answered Iseabail with a vague sense of mystery. ‘So, I am not quite getting the thing this is not your place’ ‘I know’, laughed Ian ‘does not make sense, does it?’ The memory then began to fade away while the light started to shine, spotless over the sea embracing them above the white cliffs. The two stopped talking and started walking by the shore. The cliffs were a few steps behind them. There was a footpath cutting through the hills which appeared to be designed just to follow vanishing shapes of the clouds above before those could move to the next transfiguration stage. Or at least, this is what Ian used to say. And that day again, hand in hand by the clouds hunting track on a silent, cold spring morning by the sea. Iseabail was quite tall, though not as much as Ian and pale in complexion just like him. She had a power within, noticeable even in her walk, suggesting an iron will behind those beautiful, astonishingly blue eyes. And strength she had in will not only. A keen sports player in college and university, even an Olympic player in the national volleyball team. She used to enjoy challenges as a team player, with a rare ability in connecting different people within the team in critical match moments. It was a hard choice to balance her love for the sport with her bright mind ambitions. Still, she did manage to complete her PhD in English literature with honours and she was now starting a career as a freelance journalist.

Ian, on the other hand, was much less linear in his growth. Studied art at the academy, initially without much of a success. The turn of his life was when he met Iseabail and got to know his own style. He honestly did not even think to be a particularly good painter. Nevertheless, true inspiration came.

It was all a matter of inspiration. Like a pilot storming between clouds. Like an engineer or a surgeon working on a different case or project. Like a writer on a novel, like a parent talking to a child. In the end, experience is nothing less than getting old onto the same mistakes in a samsara of rebirths. But where would that sparkle be? That living force within us that leaves an everlasting trace of energy and joy in what we touch, then? And that energy then lives by us and through us, like a sculptor moulds the matter which shapes him back again into his own creation. Through invisible shape and colours travels over different souls like a rainbow touches the clouds without being caught in any of them. That living force may call us through a dream, a shine of light. With beauty and simplicity of the essence of flowers. Ever young and eternal, here long before we came and even longer after we will leave. That power of innocence within.

Iseabail was the inspiration for Ian. She was the blue of his paintings, she was the new set of colours he went to buy when he finished his work, she was his empty canvas before starting a new work…she was just all of it for him.

They went on the trail. Funnily enough, Iseabail always let Ian guide when they walked together, her hand firmly behind his. Like a child following the kite, leaving the ultimate direction to the wind.

They were in their late twenties with an ordinary life. Moved from Oxford to a London suburb for Iseabail`s job, while Ian managed to get a small space for painting in their little flat. He used to sell paintings to wealthy clients and galleries exhibitions in European cities. The career seemed to have taken an upside turn when they moved to London for his wife’s job. This was completely unintentional on Ian’s side. Not that he did not want to succeed, he just had no idea on how to do it. He really was not very good in handling clients, and all his works were floating between inspiration and chance. Sometimes lucky, many other times, not really. He could not function within a routine, as the matter was all being in contact with the flowing mystery of life, his source of inspiration. It was Iseabail and nature. From them, uncountable combinations and permutations were mixed into his paintings.

Ian was the sort of person who could not plan and let things happen to him. For him, life was just like one of his canvases that you never know how are going to turn out to be until the last brush-stroke.

Along the trail there were some flowers, daffodils. They stopped to look at them. Gently waving in the wind, vivid yellow colours reflecting the indecision of the sky caught in between a potential sudden rain and a stream of clouds flowing like a river.

"We've got to go back, I’ve got some work to do’ said Iseabail suddenly, remembering she had a close deadline for finishing off writing an article. 

‘That is right, said Ian, taking a picture of the daffodil.’ We are going to need some yellow for today, aren't we? Goes well with the sky. He picked one of them and put it in his coat pocket with care, after wrapping it up in a small towel.

By the time they drove back it was nearly 7 am, the city was waking up to the usual rhythm. Iseabail dropped Ian on her way to the office. He went back walking to the apartment. Trying to avoid the morning rush of people going to work, he took a secondary street facing houses' backyards. Despite the rush hour, there was hardly anyone around, as he came by a small playground in the neighbourhood. It rained all day yesterday and it was one of those beautiful clear days with vivid colours. In the end, the morning clouds were seemingly merciful over them. So much undeserved beauty in a sunny morning! Especially after the elements taught you to be wary of the wet way into a rainy day. As scary as it can be, unpromising in the flourishing spontaneity of nature. Colours were vivid as if alive and shining a beautiful synaesthesia of blue notes slowly turning into a more decisive cobalt. The green was a garment around it, as the trees had been hosts of angels in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Branches torn towards the sky, scattered here and there by foreign bodies of houses’ roofs, as remnants of a strange world dropped over from a faraway star. And that shiny blue sky, so deep, in the middle. With little clouds all over, suggesting but not defining the borders of that vibrant beauty.

Ian was nearing a little playground all lost in the ‘vaults of London’, so to speak. Suddenly, something behind the slide appeared to be moving. It was a white figure like a horse but no larger than a dog. On a closer look it was a horse, perhaps a baby one. Its head was stuck underneath the slide. Maybe I was trying to get some grass or so and could then not get out from there. Ian hurried to help the unlucky animal and, to his surprise, it did not turn out to be quite as expected.

On that tiny horse muzzle, right in the middle of two sweet black eyes, there was a white horn twisting upward. There were also pale little wings, bent close and apparently too small to fly. It was a unicorn!

Ian was a person with a vivid imagination, nevertheless never quite foretold he could have met a unicorn in his lifetime. Moreover, this one appeared to be quite keen on him, as if got stuck underneath the slide while waiting just for him. Now, it could join the ‘old friend’ again. The unicorn rubbed his head on Ian’s leg as if wanted to hug him. ‘What am I going to do?’ Ian thought. He liked the unicorn too, but there was no way to keep it at home. They only had a small apartment without a garden. He did not think about how a unicorn might have appeared in this world. Or why it was trotting next to him now, as if they had always known each other. They just walked over the empty street, as it was the most natural thing walking that road together.

The only obvious solution was to find him a place to stay and, immediately, Ian thought of Charles.

Charles was Ian’s best friend since primary school. Then, although they took different directions in life, they had always kept a close connection ever since.

Differently from Ian, Charles was from a posh London family. Duke of Snow-Peak Flight, he had his ancestors sitting in the House of Lords.

While his parents were still living in the old family castle in the countryside, he moved into a large city house with a garden to pursue his lifetime dream of acting in theatre. The main thing for him was that he had the garden, and there was a good chance he might have been at home as he used to work in the evening.

That was a brilliant idea. Ian walked over there with the unicorn. Oddly enough, the street was now crowded but nobody seemed to notice either of them.

He rang the bell of his old friend’s grey Victorian door.

‘Who's there?’ A sleepy voice answered. ‘He must have just woken up, not a happy bunny’, Ian thought. ‘It’s me, Ian. Listen, I've got something to ask you, it is important’. ‘Can’t we talk another time?’ Said Charles still sleepy, with an obvious resistance in getting back to the daily routine. ‘We finished quite late yesterday and…’ ‘sorry. It is just that…it requires immediate attention,’ answered Ian, looking nervously at the unicorn next to him, and wondering whether it was going to get the horn stuck again in the iron railing of the stairs.

‘Good morning, Ian’ said Charles, opening the door. His long red hair was all over his face and he also definitively needed a shave. He had the appearance of a Celtic warrior betrayed by a strong London accent, which interestingly mixed with Ian’s Scottish accent in their long conversations. Charles was huge, more than 6.7 feet which made even Ian’s 6.2 look small. He was also a Judoka, black belt 4th dan, even more scaring when he got angry- though that did very rarely happen.

‘What have you got here, then?’ He asked, looking at him with his pale blue eyes now finally awake. ‘It’s a unicorn Charlie, I need you to keep it in the garden’ answered Ian with a voice as if he was asking his friend to lend him some salt for cooking. ‘There is no unicorn here Ian, it is just you and me’ replied Charles with a question mark on his face.

Ian looked next to him. The little unicorn was still standing there now looking at him and Charles with a rather neutral expression. Assuming unicorns can have a facial expression, that was just Ian’s interpretation.

‘So, you cannot see it, Charles, or perhaps only I can see it’ concluded Ian. ‘So, it appears, mate’ answered Charles. ‘Anyway, that’s fine, I do not mind keeping a unicorn in the garden, especially an invisible one’ said Charles with a big smile. He knew his friend well enough to understand this was a serious thing, and even if did not have a clue of what was going on-whether there actually was a unicorn or Ian was getting crazy or something. Still, he just went on with it as if was boarding on a new adventure.

‘Come in, the both of you’ said Charles, ‘we might have had breakfast together. I have a free morning.’

‘Thank you, Charlie’ said Ian, and timidly got into the house. The unicorn found its way to the large garden in the backyard, while the two friends sat in the kitchen.

Ian simply loved Charles' home. It was like a wizard’s house. Four levels including the attic, full of theatre stuff of any kind: costumes climbing out of the wardrobes, open books in the middle of being read aloud, the air still vibrating with energy of comedy and drama. Each floor had its own personality and was a world of its own right. The first floor was the door to the world, as Charles used to say. There were white walls with high roofs, little Corinthian orders decorations by the doors. There was a reasonably large hall in the centre, facing the garden in the backyard. Open space with a large kitchen. Charles used to have receptions with friends and colleagues from the theatre world. And so, those white walls, just like a white canvas, could turn in any different colour and permutation then. It was an ever-changing environment, a wind gallery. And the magic in it was that everything was short lived. Like a Cinderella night, everything happened and disappeared, washed into the white walls and its acacias sculptures watching from above.

The second floor was the hall of mystery. It was a wooden floor, hosting three main rooms: Charlie’s home office, Victoria’s room and the so-called creation space. Victoria was Charles' girlfriend, and had been living with him for a few years. She also had noble origins but was quite different. A refined personality and lover of nice things, she recently completed her studies in international comparative law. Her room was simple and elegant, with law books piled behind the desk. A little sculpture of an ivory elephant in the middle of the room and chessboard like floor. Because of her profession, she had travelled around the world quite a few times. Photos and memories were hanging all over the place. The reason for the hall of Mystery name, was that it was essentially a work space, his and Victoria’s. Now, that being work related meant to him a random assembly of objects and tasks received over time, piled up after execution like old statues in a scruffy museum. That was the summary of a part of his life. A collage of different moods and ages collected in a short lifespan which, to the untutored eyes of Ian, did not really make sense.

The third floor was the relax area, with Charles and Victoria’s bedroom, of course their guest’s bedroom, which was often a second home to Ian and Iseabail. The floor was quite large and there were in the middle a couple of smaller rooms which were differently furnished based on the landlord’s mood, as well as on their guests taste and expectations. Charles was also happy to keep a few canvases from Ian, and one of the little rooms on the third floor was in fact used as a temporary studio. Others, of not indifferent artistic value, were given as a gift from Ian to the generous couple and were moved into the different rooms based on the moods and seasons of the owners.

The fourth floor was perhaps the best. Charles called it the forest. It was a vast single attic room encompassing the whole floor. Here, thanks to the theatrical skills of Charles, wooden panels creating a maze-like space were moved along the floor. The environment was shiny and dynamic, also because of huge windows embracing the green shadows of pine trees in the garden. That was perhaps the reason for the floor’s name. It was built in a way that a green light could get onto the floor, creating the illusion of being far away, in a green fairy world or a wild Nordic Forest. Whereas, they were in central London. Along the maze rooms there were all sorts of objects, from wooden toys to telescopes, Ian’s pictures, and mediaeval tapestry. It was all surprise and wonder as their present life at the time.

Ian entered the first floor, following Charles and being followed by their invisible friend. The stairs were steep and filled with posters, citations, and old plays pictures. Charles was quite an imposing presence on stage also given his voice. He did enjoy it though, learning from others and the house was full of his friends and colleague’s work. It really was like being on a stage.

The two friends sat in the kitchen on two large red armchairs, while Charles poured some coffee. ’What’s up with the unicorn then?’ Charles asked. He had an expression mixed between surprise and wonder, as if Ian just came not to ask him a favour, but more importantly to reveal a mysterious plot for a new play out of a foggy contemplation. Charles loved those things.

‘Well, I came across it in a small playground on the way home, not too far from here this morning’ said Ian with a dreamy expression on his face. ‘I just went to see the sunrise by the sea with Iseabail you see’ ‘Oh nice!’ Replied Charles with the feeling they were getting back to the plot. ‘And what did you see?’

‘The unicorn, you mean?’ Asked Ian. ‘No, begin from the sunrise’ answered Charles. ‘Oh yes! So we were by the cliffs, we travelled there by night so that the Milky Way was in front of us. Literally an ocean of stars. There were no lights in the area. Dazzling white pastels sculptured the black of the universe with spirals of hope. Uncountable and unreachable like drops of water in a waterfall. Ever changing and eluding our faint look fallen in those depths, uninvited. But necessary, as we need to dream at night and abide by those forgotten feelings in daylight, while awake.

Then, from the east a timid light arose, gently pushing away the night. Clouds flying over us, almost through us. Initially a very few, perhaps lost in their journey to the new world. But then, the number increased like we opened the door to a cotton candy factory in the sky, making up one after the other. Those were also very high clouds; I would say cirrus clouds.’ ’Which colour?’ asked Charles, deeply listening ‘orange at first, then gradually moved to pink and finally faded to white’. ‘It reminds me of that painting of yours’ said Charles. ‘Oh yes that is right’ replied Ian, ‘the one I haven’t managed to complete as yet’. They were talking about a recent Ian's painting called breakfast with clouds featuring a deep blue sky (just like Iseabail eyes) and a dramatic crowding of cirrus clouds. The clouds were converging towards a central point, as if attracted by an unknown gravity force. Apparently, Ian initially got the idea after reading about the gravitational anomaly in our universe which drives converging galaxies together for unknown reasons, and tried to apply it to clouds. Still, he got stuck in between galaxies and clouds, and could not bring the painting to an end. Also, it was not clear how the word breakfast was supposed to fit in with everything else. Perhaps the fresh deep blue of the morning sky was breakfast time.

‘And about the gravitational centre, Charles, they were all converging in a direction. Just from one horizon to the other, it was like they were jumping above us, if you see the sky as an enormous crystal ball. Then moving west, maybe.’ ‘Cool’ said Charles, who was picturing the morning sky in his mind’s eye. ‘There always is a gravity centre, isn’t it? And what else?’ ‘Oh, there were daffodils, of course! Just a few of them, no more than three or four, standing by the footpath, a surprise!’ Said Ian with an enthusiastic look ‘and you should have seen the yellow, so bright that just the sight of it did really wake me up. Their petals gently dance in the sea wind over their stem. Each one with its rhythm, different and connected to the other as well as to the cloud’s migration above. It was beautiful’. ‘What a nice confluence of energies’ replied Charles. ‘And then the unicorn came in, right?’ ‘Yes, it had the horn stuck underneath the slide of a playground. Immediately did seem to recognize me and we got on well with each other. I had the feeling it was waiting for me maybe…delivering a message? Do not know what the unicorns usually do. Anyway, just thought of bringing it over to you because of the garden. No one else seemed to notice it on the way here’ answered Ian, before drinking all the coffee in one breath. He completely forgot to drink that morning and was very thirsty.

‘I believe this part too’, answered Charles with a smile. ‘Where do we go from now? Do not know much about unicorns either’ ‘well, I say we just wait and see what happens’ Ian replied putting on his wide brimmed hat. ‘Fine for me Ian, sounds like fun’ replied Charlie, who really could not stop smiling. Especially because he did not see the unicorn, that joyous mystery to him was as enjoyable as having a walk in the cold woods in autumn. Charles loved cold woods. A collage of yellow and browns, a deer, or who knows what surprise was the wood going to bring him.

Charles was for Ian a fertile audience; someone who could find him amusing without often really understanding. For that, there was only Iseabail. Ian was for Charles the trompe l’oeil in a theatrical scenography. He suddenly came up with ideas and things that appeared to make no sense at all at first sight but were somehow magically connecting their world to different levels of colours and music. A spicy breeze of wind makes everything more fun.

‘Good morning, Ian. Are you coming over here tonight with Iseabail?’ Asked a female voice from the stairs. It was Victoria Catherine Foster, Charle’s girlfriend. Victoria was a practising barrister and daughter of two lawyers. Although not from an ancient aristocratic family like Charles, she was also quite wealthy.

Her family tradition was the study of law, with grandparents all taking important positions in law courts.

They met on stage and were living together with plans to get married soon, though not too soon like Ian and Iseabail did. Her emerald green eyes cut through her blonde hairs, like fireflies behind willow leaves. She was of a classic female beauty, being for fun and vanity a fashion model in her spare time. She dressed up expensive and wore a pale amount of make-up, even in that hour of the morning. Too pale to be noticed but not enough not to get her unnoticed. A small sharp nose, which gave her almost a foxy look. She always had an unwittingly serious and grave expression, betrayed by the fact she did love having fun, instead.

Funnily enough, she faintly looked like the Ian-female version, though there was no blood relation between them. On the other hand, her personality was very different, especially because Victoria loved to have people around. In fact, the line between her life and Charles’s stage was somehow blurred, the one taking inspiration from the other. Just like Ian and his paintings.

She was standing on the third to last stair step. Dressed up in an imperial style nightgown, which gave her a solemnity above her age. Victoria was only a couple of years older than Ian and Charles. But somehow looked much older, with a full lived, tired expression of her face, otherwise emanating a neoclassical beauty. Her smile was the middle way between enjoying things brought on by fate and an ancient tiredness of those who have already tried all experiences and grew old before time.

That stood in sharp contrast with the childishly naughty expression on Charles’ face. Moreover, he was standing on the floor by the same stairs and looked definitively taller than her. Ian could not help noticing the strikingly contrasting picture of a serious mature woman being literally dwarfed by the huge red-haired child.

Victoria had deep green eyes, strangely like Ian’s. He could see in them a walk in the desert. A quest for invisible roads under the stars while holding an ancient Arab map. A colour of despair which is not devoid of hope. Hope to find a way not traced in the ever-changing sand, but from the ancient reading of the stars above.

That she was, looking to the stars to make her way to the world.

On the other hand, Charle`s big and light blue eyes might have taken Ian deep into a Northern Forest covered by snow. A boundless taiga filled by fierce and wild animals. Answering to no one, but an inner voice of enigmatic ancient equinoxes. He was the earth, bringing with him all which is alive and strong. Irrational powerful passion, driven by Victoria’s neoclassical-tired beauty.

While Ian was deeply absorbed in his friend’s picture, Victoria was thinking what now?

She only woke up a few minutes before. Slower and less energetic than Charles. Though surrounded by artists due to her boyfriend's profession, Ian remained out of her catch. She could not quite focus on what he was so deeply absorbed into. It always appeared that while looking at them he was beyond them. As if they were a picture, an image, a memory of a dream to grasp before it fades away. A hint of unease to her stable and fashionable world. Because Ian could give them the involuntary feeling of being on the scene of a play. There were two things though, that deeply connected the two of them.

One was music.

Victoria played the piano beautifully. She loved Mozart. But she also loved Beethoven and could perform his piano sonatas with an incisively dramatic touch.

When Ian and Iseabail came by, she could play and chat with them for hours in the attic. That music moved worlds within. Went through the decorated roofs and then silently towards the noisy London night up to the billions of stars, looking at them from the heavens and enjoying that tiny play within the larger picture. Not a chance that the following morning was Ian able to mix new colours and sort to new compositions, unthinkable the day before. That revealed just how wild and unknown Victoria was, enclosed behind that greenhouse flower appearance.

The music was also the backbone structure of the wooden walls of the house. And that rhythm was deep inside Victoria too. Ruling the way she woke up, the feelings she had while looking at Charles and the living mosaic of her emotions climbing upon the hours of her day off.

The other thing in common with Ian was the colour of the eyes. She looked like his elder sister with those sparking green eyes. And she did look at him like a younger brother who gets lost in the things of a world that still surprises him. A child who is full of untutored expectancy and wonders for a universe that to him has no names or purposes. This subtle complicity between Ian, Charles and Victoria was their friendship and somehow a second family. And then, of course, there was Iseabail. There in the hall, filling the air with the presence of her absence. There was no Ian’s painting without Iseabail in it. No piano sonata without Iseabail by it. If Ian was the hands on a brush, Victoria the fingers on the piano, Charles the voice, presence, and personality on the stage, Iseabail was the vibrant sound of beauty behind all of that. Invisible and quiet, albeit powerful and empowering in her humble, astonishing beauty. If Victoria was a greenhouse flower, perhaps a rose, Iseabail was a rare and unique flower on the top of a mountain. The only shining star in a universe of void. An oasis in the desert. A single untarnished alpine star in a desert, the only flower in a world revolving around a faraway star.

What Victoria meant to say was the evening event at their home, in which they used to invite friends and acquaintances from the theatre world. Ian and Iseabail loved these meetings because they were full of strange new people, with exotic stories and adventures to share. It was like being in Neverland or on a pirate ship.

‘Good morning, Victoria. Would not miss that for the world’ answered Ian. ‘Ian`s just brought us an invisible unicorn,’ added Charles. ‘Oh, thank you Ian, that is nice of you’ smiled Victoria ‘it’s in the garden’ says Ian. Just going to make sure he's fine before leaving’. ‘Sure’ said Victoria and moved along with him and Charles to the garden. Charles' house had a large beautiful garden in the backyard, a few chairs under a porch surrounded by an elegant English style lawn. Further down on the back there were a few oak trees, which he and Victoria called the little forest, with tiny flowers gazing from the white moss around their roots. It was quite a large garden, and the unicorn was trotting around the little forest exploring here and there, seemingly very happy about its new home. Again, rubbed his nose on Ian's leg and went back hiding behind a tree. ‘I am leaving you here for now, my friend,’said Ian. ‘You are in good hands but I’ll come to visit as often as I can.’ ‘Sure, you can come here any time mate,’ said Charles. ‘Oh, there's something else’ Ian said, with the air of someone who just forgot something important ‘I had a dream tonight, my room was struck by lightning’ ‘Did it catch fire?’ Asked Charles ‘No, it was just the lightning’ ‘oh well, not the end of the world, then,’ laughed Charles. Victoria, who also could not see the unicorn and just saw Ian talking to himself was a bit more worried: ‘are you alright Ian?’ she asked. ‘What does Iseabail say?’ ‘Oh, she was a bit annoyed by the dream,’ laughed Ian, ‘but we have no clues on what that means. Anyway, I am fine thanking you. I think that after talking to you two I got some good points to work on breakfast with clouds. I’ll be going now, see you later and have a nice day.’

‘See you Ian’ they both replied at the same time and off he went on the streets.

This time he managed to get back home without surprises or fantastic animals on his way. Ian and Iseabail Mac Lochlainn’s house was a rented three room flat, with an attic above which was in effect Ian’s studio. The landlord was not that keen on renting the house to an artist but Iseabail was quite persuasive and her Oxford PhD in English literature at 25 years old did sound quite impressive. Not to mention she was an Olympic athlete, too. ‘Thank you Iseabail’-thought Ian. Sometimes he wondered what such a wonderful person may find in him. But perhaps the point was Iseabail in Ian saw a road without end, a dynamic movement that could not be caught by time or definitions and that was exactly her direction. They married at 20, both university students in a secret ceremony attended by Charles, Victoria, and a few other friends. People around them thought it was a bit mad getting married at such a young age, but for them that was just a normal thing. Clear it was they belonged to each other as much as they belonged to this planet.

Their flat was