Drop.

    Pinkie was left with a frightful choice. After twenty years of friendship, the middle-aged mare had been left without a pony by her side. Twilight was busy with her students at the newly minted Academy, Rainbow Dash had ascended to Wonderbolt Captain and forgotten her friends... Applejack was busy raising her family, Fluttershy had... moved on some time ago...

    Rarity had been the last of her friends to even pretend to care for her. That had ended last year, when, after a stilted conversation over a bland lunch, she had screamed out the peppy pink pony to act her age.

    In the twenty years between meeting her friends, even as they grew up and forgot one another, Equestria had changed. New Bearers had been found as each lost touch with her Element. Only Pinkie had remained, in the end. The Cakes had passed on, leaving the business split between her and the twins- but even that felt more like a business partnership rather than a friendship or even family relationship, more and more every year.

    Eventually, demand for her parties began to slacken as the stress of her life got to her. Her mane hung straight and limp, and she watched the ground when she walked most days. A cloud formed over her, that grew darker and darker, before a daily downpour began in the past year.

    Ponyville didn't feel like home anymore. Nowhere that she could, and did eventually visit, did anymore. Every morning when she woke, she told herself; "Today will be better. Today ponies will love me again. Today my friends will remember me."

    But that day never came.

    One particularly dim morning found the middle-aged mare, who now walked everywhere instead of bouncing and whose cotton candy mane bore streaks of gray, trotting along the pathways of Ponyville's cemetery. Fluttershy had had it written in her will to be buried in the ground she belonged on.

    She was treated to a sight she would never have expected in a million years. A hopeful grin crossed her muzzle as she raced forward, hair curling upward at the ends...

    Framed by a dull glow, her butter-yellow friend stood unharmed on top of the gravestone that marked her final resting place. She smiled a little bit, her eyes opening as they watched her pink friend run towards her.

    "Hi Pinkie."

    Four horseshoes dug into the cobbles as Pinkie came to a sharp screeching halt, panting as the clammy mist filling the air clung shakily to her coat. Dash stood next to Fluttershy with a small smile. Pinkie launched herself the last few feet through the air, forelegs outstretched.

    For the first time in ten years, Dash caught the pink mare and rolled with her in a laughing heap. When they came to rest with Pinkie on top, her mane inflated and poured back out of its normal curly messiness. A grin split her face from ear to ear. "I missed you guys!"

    A thought struck her. "Dashie, why are you in Ponyville? I mean... I can't wait to grab the rest of the girls, but I thought you never wanted to see any of us again! And besides, aren't you incredibly super-duper busy with the new recruits?"

    Dash grinned in that Warden-may-care way she'd always had. The years had treated her well, it seemed she hadn't aged a day since that last spot...

    "Nah. We're good for the whole day. Why don't you come with me and Fluttershy, Pinks? We'll do all your favorite things, just like the old days."

    Pinkie grinned as she hopped off Dash. When she hit the ground again, she expected the knee she'd injured years ago during one of their adventures to give. It held. In fact... none of her healed-over injuries gave her the slightest amount of strain.

    Pinkie just shrugged it off. "Why don't we get the others?"

    Dash and Fluttershy both shook their heads in unison, as they moved to stand next to one another and approach Pinkie slowly.

    "It's not time for them, yet. You're close, Pinkie... So weary... Just give up. Drop into your grave." Dash gave a shaky smile, and swallowed with tears staining the corners of her eyes. "Don't make it hard, like I did. Go easy. We'll all play on the other side."

    Fluttershy nodded a little bit and gave the beatific smile Pinkie had always known her for in their long friendship. That angelic little grin.The partymare almost saw a halo.

    “I’m dreaming. You aren’t real… Fluttershy is dead, and you must be too, Dashie…”

    “Well, yeah. But you’re close. Just come with us, Pinkie, I thought you were our friend?”

    She shook her head sadly. It pained her more than anything else, to leave the shades of her friends behind, but she couldn’t leave yet. Her other friends…

    Pinkie sat up in bed, soaked through with night-sweat from the small nightmare. She groaned a little bit and rubbed her skull under her hooves, closing her eyes a little bit as she flopped back onto her pillow. There would be no more sleeping tonight.

   I wonder if what they say is true… if you kill yourself, do not get to go to Elysium like they say? What if Nana Pie was right, and suicides become civil servants?

    At a more reasonable hour, Pinkie rose. She plastered on a fake smile as she sat at her little desk, beginning to slowly and painfully brush out her straightened mane. Why had she denied her two closest friends in the whole world? She sighed a little bit and shook her head.

    First, a quick shower. She stood under the warm spray for quite a while, scrubbing away the stickiness she had accrued over the night. Heh, that was a funny word, accrued. She smiled a little bit as she turned off the water and shook herself dry.

    She grabbed down a towel and finished drying herself, pulling a brush onto her hoof and running the stiff bristles through her mane to finish straightening and neatening it. Satisfied, she squeezed a small amount of toothpaste onto her brush.

    She hummed as she brushed for a full sixty seconds. She spat, rinsed her mouth out with warm water, then a shot of the spearmint-flavored antiseptic she rather liked. With a slight wince as it irritated a cavity, she sighed a little bit, before sipping a fluoride rinse into her maw and swished it a time. What? Proper oral hygiene is important.

    Her alarm clock chirped cheerfully in her bedroom, causing her to flick the strand of floss she had into the garbage. Four AM. Time for her morning to officially start. She smiled as she ventured downstairs as quietly as she could manage with shod hooves.

    Immediately she moved to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, cooking herself a fried egg inside a piece of toast for breakfast while she waited for the pot. Setting both on a tray, she trotted to a small table near the kitchen window, settling down and pouring a small measure of syrup across her meal.

    She ate in her own silent companionship, overcome with a deep melancholy as she gave the two empty chairs at her table a pointed look. She and Fluttershy used to eat breakfast together… And then Dash would come in a little bit later for coffee and a bagel…

    But they wouldn’t be coming today. Never again.

    Pinkie sighed deeply, and returned to her meal. The twins would be waking up soon, the mare and stallion she'd been signed guardianship of when their parents had passed violently in a robbery gone sour. Before getting them up for school, she rose and carefully washed her dishes. The bakery could sit closed today.

Pumpkin and Pound knew something was wrong, but it was a sort of wrongness they'd known most of their lives. You never really got used to Pinkie's melancholy, you just made room for it. She did a good enough job of putting up a cheerful facade that nopony really ever knew the real her.

She smiled a little bit, her mane curling at the ends. Things would get better, soon.

Dutifully, the twins marched along behind her to school, where Pinkie waved goodbye to her adopted children. Someone else would love them. Someone else would take better care of them.

You're lucky they haven't been taken away yet. Forty years old and you still act like a child! You should just go ahead.

Pinkie nodded to herself. That voice was making more and more sense lately. She set down a hoof with a renewed sense of vigor, and made her way to the Town Hall. While she didn't fully intend on going anywhere, it made sense to keep one's affairs in order. In case something happened. In case things got better.

With all the 'I's dotted and 'T's crossed, she trotted back out into the warm summer morning, keeping her eyes down on the path below her so she didn't step on a stone. Ponies who still remembered the exuberant mare of twenty years ago shook their heads sadly. Pinkie didn't notice, and wouldn't have cared.

Maybe an extra one of those pills the doctor had given her. She smiles, yes, that would be nice.

Before she really has a chance to realize what she's doing, where she's going, or what will happen, she's staring at herself in the mirror. A half-empty glass of water rests on the sink, an empty amber bottle marked with a label in incomprehensible Equestrian lies on its side on the floor. One shod forehoof presses against the reflection's cheek.

She imagines she can feel it, a loving and caring hoof on her own muzzle. A face inches from her own, a soft voice telling her You matter. Empty your stomach of those pills.

But then she remembers. Nobody had said those words in years. Her pills, she found out to be placebos ages ago. The twins could care for themselves, now, and run the bakery. Maybe hire a worker less prone to catatonic fits. She shook her head a little bit. Worthless, worthless mare.

Her hooves drag as she trots out of her bathroom and into her bedroom. The multiple springs of her mattress creak their mournful song. She sighed deeply, looking down at the floor. Her eyes caught the end of a rope, good thick cord... hovering an inch or so from the ground.

She tilted her head as she looked up, following the cord to where it ended in a loop, held up to perfectly frame her face in the mirror vanity opposite her bed by a trio of balloons. She must have tied it for herself without thinking. This would work. She smiled, and slowly rose.

Within a minute or two, she was standing on a stool with the other end of the noose tied around one of the rafters in her bedroom. She smiled widely at the mirror as she stared into it. She imagined she saw an image of Dash, Fluttershy, and the Cakes reflected in the blue and yellow balloons tied to the noose.

She took a deep breath and smiled. Her hair curled as she tipped herself forward... and nudged the stool out from underneath herself in the same motion.