P A N O P T I C O N

I am Celestia. I have many titles, but I tell myself they do not make me who I am.

I am one of two, a Princess of this world.

I have a student, Twilight Sparkle.

I have transcended death, and in doing so have become as a god.

This much I tell myself I know.

All the rest is theory. All the rest is merely the musings of an iridosmine-tipped pen, scratching incoherent ramblings on a papyrus long degraded, straining to avoid the entropy that will claim us all.

Even me.

I have resigned myself to the fact that one day I will die, that one day my tidy little world, so full of happiness, will simply cease to exist.

The brief universe we will have lived in will vanish, merely a blink in the presence of some greater order. Even a god cannot halt the machinations of this world which bore it into being, for so long as I remain of this world, I am bound to it and its laws.

This much I have accepted.

It may seem strange, a contradiction, even, to say I cannot die while acknowledging my own death, in some far-off time. But are the two so different, so mutually incompatible?

Immortality is by definition forever. But what does "forever" mean? Is it an hour? A day? A millennium?

An hour spent with a lover evokes a rush of dopamine comparable to nearly nothing I know of, yet it is not forever. Hours are perceptible, they pass with scripted, cyclic regularity. So are days, weeks, moons, months, and even years. What of other measurements of time?

A birthday is a year, a season is a few months, each of which is roughly a moon. Two weeks is approximately a moon, and seven days are in a week. Just over three hundred four days is a year. One more birthday. But it's perceptible, cyclic. I can say "this year I am one year older."

What, or when, is the dividing line between time and not-time? The very fact that we do not have a word for "not-time" illustrates our perceptual lack of it.

But it can, and therefore must, exist, as though even I cannot comprehend a world without time, time itself must have come from not-time. Must it have?

All these musings seem out of place when my world is full of sunshine and laughter, and the sun and moon seem to rise and fall in the heavens each day and night. After all, I must perceive time in the sun's risings and fallings, for I create them. I decode them. I give them meaning, and appreciate them. But forgive an old mind, to whom the tides of time have dealt many a blow. This is the only place I can write this, and so I must.

Is a millennium an eternity? To a subject of mine, whose life cannot span more than a few decades before they drift once more into the dust of the earth, it may seem to be. Is it the lifespan of an immortal? No. I have seen millenniums pass, waiting for my sister's return, distracting myself from what I believe to be time's slow plod. To a butterfly, flitting for a brief moment in the great chasm of time, a millennium is incomprehensible, foreign. It means no more as a concept than "infinity" means to beings whose hooves number four, and who cannot see the purpose of counting so high.

Does it matter what "forever" is? Do I need to know how long my labored breathing will carry on before it all commences to pass? Is it right to ask simply because I want to know? My selfishness pains me, but that is all I believe to be the truth. I want to know, simply because I cannot bear not knowing. This not-knowing is lonely; "forever" seems either too distant or not distant enough.

I know it is selfish and wrong to say I am lonely because and only because I know not how long my tenure will last, how many friends I'll lose -- or gain -- simply by existing. At least, I tell myself that I know it. I tell myself forever is long away, but not too long.

Forever is my closest friend. Luna is my sister, but things will never be the same. Cadance is living her own life, awash with joy in a temporary committal that seems as farcical as a butterfly loving a subject of mine. I tell myself I should not be so cynical, that it is wrong to mock others' love. I simply am saddened, I think. It has happened once too many for me.

But forever isn't cold and detached like Luna can be, with soft-hard scowls at night as she remembers the suffering I inflicted -- I, and I alone -- on her for a millennium. Forever isn't nearly as joyful as Cadance, but I'll never see a seemingly unshatterable melancholy consume forever once Shining passes on. Forever is simply there, a manifestation of whatever is manifested. What its true nature is, I have no rational idea. Forever is just, only just, and always just a slightly warm feeling, a sidelong glance thrown to no-one in particular. It exists everywhere, a silent wanderer among us.

Forever is what keeps me alive, I have decided. It ties me inexorably to my subjects, however distant I may become. We share the same fate, after all.

I will not live forever in the most extreme sense of the word. I will die when all that is comes to an end. But is that not living forever? When not-time is all there is, what becomes of time?

I will not live forever, or maybe I will. That is irrelevant, a semantic. But I will live for forever. That much I promise you.