“No, that’s not it,” said Silver Spoon.
She still used quills when writing at home, which was far from the most practical thing in the world. Everypony else her age had long since gotten used to pencils, and even pens. But neither was allowed in Silver Spoon’s house.
She flipped through the pages of a spiral notebook with a strip of white tape on the front. On the tape had been written “Sandbar & Yona” in dark ink.
“Would Sandbar also say ‘everycreature’? Hmm,” she muttered. “No, wait,” she continued, “if he hangs out with non-pony creatures all the time, then of course he would say it.” She re-examined her notes, dating back about a year and three months, since around the time Sandbar and Yona had gotten married. She had long since considered adding them to the so-called encyclopedia, but their wedding day made the addition all the more appropriate. Not only that, but since they had become an established couple in Ponyville, Silver Spoon felt the increasing need to eavesdrop.
Ah, “eavesdrop,” what a deviant word. But truth be told, she only listened in on their conversations whenever they so happened to be close enough. She never went out of her way to listen in on the conversations had by creatures who would have entries in the encyclopedia. Intentionally spying would be going too far, yes.
Silver Spoon sighed and flipped to the most recently used page. It was a fresh one, written that very afternoon. She had gone out to enjoy some tea at her favorite cafe when the pony and yak duo entered the scene on similar business.
“Sandbar no like his tea unsweetened,” said Yona, in an expression that showed both ridicule and appreciation. “Always go for the cheap sweetened recipe, never for the real healthy mixtures.”
“Hmm,” Silver Spoon murmured once again. She took her quill in her mouth and stared down the word “go” in the second sentence. Within hours her memory was already failing her with the particulars, “the particulars” being a phrase Grandma loved to use. “Would it be ‘go’ or ‘goes’?” she wondered. The incredible simplicity of Yona’s speech always confounded her, and she still had not entirely grown accustomed to it.
More generally speaking, the yaks were a rough bunch to record in dialogue format. There were several species which had been living in Ponyville for quite some time now, ever since Silver Spoon was still a little filly, but the yaks... oh, the yaks. Not that she minded the yaks from a cultural or racial standpoint, because that would be wrong. Rather, it was sometimes difficult to make out what they were saying, especially when they conversed with somepony else. “Someone? Somecreature?” pondered Silver Spoon. She rubbed her temples before adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses. The details of the encyclopedia mattered, but they also presented a special breed of challenge at times. Still, she felt it had to be done.
She looked over the rest of the entry and gave herself a figurative pat on the back. At least in the case of Sandbar, writing was easy. He had hardly changed since he was a teenager, since the days when Silver Spoon herself was but a foal, and he seemed to be one of the few constants left in the town, a leftover from those now-distant years. He rarely ever raised his voice, and he always spoke in a tone which functioned to defuse any situation.
Hence, the following lines were common for Sandbar:
“Don’t think too hard about it.”
“Eh, it’s not much, but it’s something.”
“Did I forget something? Nah, probably not.”
“Appreciated, bro!”
That last one caught Silver Spoon slightly off-guard the first time she heard it. She figured Sandbar was a chill stallion, but not that he was a “bro.”
Her mind went back to Yona, and she came to the decision to change a line or two of dialogue. For instance, the aforementioned sentence now read as:
“Always goes for the cheap sweetener recipes, never for the healthy mixtures Yona gets for him at grocery store.”
She could fiddle with the line all day, rendering it in several different fashions, none of which would completely capture the words of the conversation that actually took place. Regardless, it could be much worse.
“It’ll do,” she said with an ounce of confidence, before closing the notebook and picking it up with her jaws. She took it to her bedroom, which was not the best place to be storing a metric ton of books and trinkets, but it was the best for what she had been given. She had an entire drawer at the bottom of her dresser for storing the notebooks for the encyclopedia, which was where she put the entry for Sandbar and Yona.
For reasons she could not explain to anypony, she had started writing about every known couple in Ponyville, the several dozens of them. A lot of these couples did not illicit much in the way of attention, but they did not go unnoticed. Of course, since romantic relationships often ended in failure, Silver Spoon thought to keep different residents who moved from relationship to relationship in the same notebook. The couples who were the most socially prominent, and thus the most prone to having ink spilled about their goings-on, got whole notebooks to themselves.
It wasn’t a perfect method of organization, but it was enough for now.
Finished with contributing to the encyclopedia for the time being, Silver Spoon sighed and flopped onto her bed. She buried her face in the blanket, which Grandma had sewn some years ago, when Silver Spoon was considerably younger than she was now. Eyeing her room, it was clear that most of her possessions came from her grandparents on her mother’s side, especially Grandma, who, when she was alive, treated her granddaughter even more sweetly than her own daughter and son-in-law. Most notably, there lay a record player which still worked and whose needle hit the grooves of each record as sharply as ever.
Feeling her eyelids grow heavier than usual, preparing for her regular pre-dinner nap, Silver Spoon once again had all the loving relationships of the town run through her head, like polaroids taken with an antiquated camera being shown before one’s eyes at the speed of sound. For every relationship that went through the motions, or whose existence was in jeopardy, there was at least one more whose life energy flowed strongly between the partners, and whose elegance only continued to bloom.
She considered all this love, smiled, and then left it behind.
<<<<<
The restaurant remained quiet, despite it being nighttime, with a lot of customers at tables and orders being taken. Silver Spoon sat by herself. She didn’t have a special somepony of her own to ask out, and none of her friends seemed available for a casual get-together. Not Apple Bloom, or Pipsqueak, or Tender Taps, or anypony else.
It made enough sense, or so Silver Spoon thought to herself. Everypony was busy, and it was actually common for a mare in her twenties like herself to be on her own when going out to eat anything. For every mare of Silver Spoon’s age who had a partner, there were at least three who enjoyed the single life.
She took a sip of her red wine, making sure to disquiet the calm ocean of the liquid within the glass as little as possible. Both the choice of wine and her method of drinking it were favored by few, but they brought about a sense of class, of an elegance that belonged to a different epoch. All the same, she took no pleasure in how it tasted.
Through her glasses, she saw that Sandbar and Yona had come rather close to her, for the second time in one day. They were both seated at a table some twenty feet away, with Yona appearing as if threatening to crush her seat with her weight, but with the chair standing its ground valiantly. Not that there was anything wrong about Yona’s weight. The yaks were, by nature, quite big, and also quite attractive in an unconventional way.
Silver Spoon couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but their conversation in itself did not matter at the moment. She could tell by their expressions, how they had no problem meeting eye-to-eye, that just being physically close to each other was enough for them.
Her skin beneath her coat ached. She had hoped that some couple she hadn’t been keeping track of recently had shown up instead. Even if it was Diamond Tiara and Sweetie Belle, with their fondness for physical affection so sugary as to be revolting, it would be preferable to what Silver Spoon saw now. That way, if she wrote about them, she could think about their love for each other, as opposed to how they would sound if either of them stood beside her and went to hug her in an affectionate embrace. Jealousy was, after all, an ugly emotion, and not very elegant.
She took no pleasure in it.
Her waiter, a colt with a cow-licked mane, came up to her and said, “Are you ready to order your entree, ma’am?”
“Yeah,” said Silver Spoon, despite only glimpsing passively at the menu. “I think so.”
