Wildlife

Sweetie Bell hadn’t been herself lately. Something was wrong, whether it was in the sorry was she walked around the Carousel Boutique or the sheer amount of time she spent in her room there, nose buried in her journal, pencil moving swiftly across the pages illuminated with her magic. Blue and light, and every once and a while crackling.

She had been keeping a journal since she finished high school. Since things first started feeling bad. The entries were sporadic at best, sometimes she wrote in the diary multiple times a day, other times it would sit on the desk for months. Every entry started the same way.

“Dear Diary”

It wasn’t an uncommon start; it was the same one she used when she had her first journal, back when she was a crusader still, before the ragtag group of friends finally found there purposes. That’s when things started to spiral down. Life didn’t seem to have a purpose anymore once the crusading was done. There were days, even back in high school, when she stared off in class thinking about what her cutie mark actually meant. She knew the literal meaning, yeah, she was good at music.

Singing was indeed her forte, but why? Who assigned that to her, and Apple Bloom’s artistic and engineering skills? Where did they come from, the question commonly popped up throughout her diary. The small hypothetical questions she asked herself.
The older she got, the more hopeless she felt, and that’s what she was doing that evening in her room above the boutique. It was dark out, Luna had risen the moon hours ago, but she was still writing, trying to work out everything.

“Dear Diary.

June 14th,

Things are spiraling out of control.”

She stopped writing, she had to organize her thoughts, usually that didn’t happen until later, but sometimes her stream of consciousness twisted itself around, and got lost somewhere.

“Things are spiraling out of control. I have lost hope in myself, because I am so confused. My friends are gone, my family is gone, and things are changing fast. Too fast. Lately I feel like everyone is against me, I don’t know why, I know it’s silly, it really is. Maybe even more than silly, I’m sure a lot of ponies would call it stupid. “This entry sounded to whiny though, so she left it, as it was and started again.

“Dear Diary,

I have lost it. Everyone notices now, but I find myself forgetting things a lot lately. The other day I ran to the store for Rarity, and I forgot what I was doing before I even got to the market. My mind is just too full of everything else to get through it, I’ve been thinking a lot about Feather Weight lately. I know I shouldn’t, that was all too long ago, and too painful for me.

Anyways Diary. There are days when I think that I’m going to die, or think about what it would be like if I was dead. Sometimes, I think it might be best. Not that I’d do anything bad diary, but sometimes I just get thinking.

It’s getting late and I should get to sleep but lately sleep is so painful, and writing is good, I have to write, it helps me sleep, Rarity used a word called ‘Cathartic’ when I was a filly, when I was a crusader.”

She has to stop again, because she makes a guttural sound, a wheezing, exasperated breath that tells her she needs to slow down. Lately she’s the only one telling herself those kinds of things, no one else seemed to care.

Or at least Sweetie didn’t notice the caring, instead she blocked it out, she blocked everyone else. It was Just her and her journal, and she finds herself at the bottom of the page, but when she goes to turn the page she realizes she has ran out.

She flips the back of the page, smudged and covered in pen and pencil strokes from years of use, she continues, knowing these are her last words. Or at least her last words before she reincarnates her soul into a new entity, with a new journal she has to trust.
There is not a Dear Diary now, simply a strew of words, her penmanship loose now, and sloppy as her chest heaves in surprise.
“It hurts so bad, I know that it would be okay, if they were here, the girls. Bloom and Scoots would know what to do. They would remind me of how it used to be, before my mind took over, before I got my cutie mark, back when things had meaning. Well diary, I think we both know something important. This is goodbye. You are done-dead. You will get thrown out, just like I will, just like we all will in the end.”

Except she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out.