Memior

*   *   *

It's snowing today, and I'm standing on the transit platform just before the railways, waiting for my train to arrive.

The canopy of the pasted air is a frozen blue; the dark grey overcast in the atmosphere shrouded in looming billows of clouds peaking high above the train station.  Snowflakes fluttered and hung spinning and dancing with the hymn of ice and sloth gripping the complacency of every single living and nonliving thing around me.

Wherever the frozen tuffs of chilled rain touched my barren skin they melted with the heat of my body, and sucked out any warmth with the chill of the frozen air.

The heaving bellow of the northern winds blew loudly above the world yet only placed it's feet upon the ground as a soft breeze whisking lusciously dry.

The platform was crowding slowly with ponies hidden in the steam-fogged scope.  Most of them were traveling back home from the holiday season, and with them a cacophony of chattering voices grew alongside the parking rush of breathing trains and rapturous bells, of yelling trains-men and screeching metalwork that ignited sparks blazing with color into the cold's hardened shroud.

  Somewhere amongst the noise and mist there was a violin playing a muted symphony of aged cords and cannibal rhymes eating each other after each note died in the slew of time.

Kids wearing heavy jackets and scarves and boots ran around playing in the gathering snow.

Their parents sipped on coffee and chatted with other parents while they watched their kids laughing and squealing as they threw small snowballs at each other.

One clumsy brown-maned kid ran headfirst into a station number pole, and I'm pretty sure he knocked himself out because he hadn't gotten up for like, five minutes before his folks took him to the infirmary, or some place like it back in the station building.

I'm pretty sure he'll be okay; sixty percent sure.  He'll either wake up in the next few minutes with a bad concussion, or he might have inflicted on himself a deadly case of comatose and won't wake up until fifty years later from this day.  Either way I'm still sixty percent sure that he's okay.

A few trains stood quietly around the edges of the second, third, and forth transit platforms across from my own I stood on, transit platform A.

The passenger cars of the trains were filling and falling with commuters sifting like sand grabbed by the waves of a blotched sea.

   Their coal engines bloomed slumbering black smoke out of their lunged stacks pillared atop of their backs, and behind the windows of the passenger cars lights spilled in dazzling gold illuminated like luxury wrapped in polished wood and hard angled, big-bucked industry.

I gazed a watch to some ponies inside the cars across the railways in front of me.

There was a stallion with red hair, his face pressed up against the glass.  He was sleeping, and rather handsome, but the drool drooping out of his open mouth was less attractive.  At least in my taste.

I bet to myself that he was a musician; a guitarist in some underground beggar's band playing music nobody could really understand because of how the lyrics in their songs had literally no comprehensible sense, but sounded good anyways on record.  His band would never take off though, and he would end up becoming some banker in a small town.

Then I saw a young kid in a purple hoodie.  She was around fourteen years old maybe, slouching into the window behind the glass of the next car set behind the guitarist.

What stood out most about her was her beautiful eyes; a ghastly brown-hazel lick with only a slight hint of something stranger, an incoherent, desperate blue.  She was looking up into the silver sky counting the snowflakes that hit her window, but really I think she was madly bored and just staring at anything she could've absentmindedly.

She was a ballerina at heart, soul, body, and mind.  When she grows up she's going to be the mare who spoke 'perfect' out of every movement of her body and displayed them to an audience of the rich and godly.

People are gonna love her for her grace and her heart and how she danced like a slow flame of kindling fire, but hate her for who she's become though unchanged.

She's gonna end up wildly and uncontrollably hurt, dead, and alone in a street in some city she once called her kingdom.  With a bottle of poisoned champagne that's been drunk to the bottom and broken in stars shattered besides her wallowed corpse, and eventually nobody will remember her.

A young couple, a brown mare and a yellow stallion, laid in their seats folded into one another like two letters wrapped in an envelope set in the far corner of the same car the pretty-eyed ballerina was.  They're getting married next year, I could feel it.  They met five summers ago in Drawstreet, Manehattan during a concert at Central Park.  He moved to her town the very day after the concert ended just to be with her, leaving behind everything he had ever known his entire life, and he would never once regret it for as long as he lived.

She could tell what he was thinking as easily as spotting his shadow in the corner of her eye.  Every night after their marriage they'd make love but they'd somehow never conceive a baby, and every summer morning they'd have tea on the roof of their house to be the first to see daylight, even when it would rain.

I broke my gaze from them after a few minutes, staring then at the train rails five feet below the platform.

The snow covered the rugged gravel around the rowed train tracks but somehow melted when it touched the actual rails.

It looked as though the icing ground had been wounded and had to be stitched up with iron and wood.

I lifted my half empty cup of hot chocolate in my right hoof to my lips and sipped on the hot silk that drained down my piercing throat.

I couldn't really think about the taste, it was too cold out for me to really enjoy it, but at least my stomach wasn't freezing over.

In essence, I was warm enough that I could enjoy where I was, but chilled enough to almost rather be inside someplace warmer.

    My body was draped under a black leisure coat that went all the way down to a few inches above my hooves booted in black.  I had my green beanie hat on and a white cotton scarf wrapped loosely under the collar of my coat.

Hung across my right shoulder and over my neck was my leather duffel bag, filled with only just a few things.  A book, my ticket, and a small purse of bits.

I glanced over to a large clock mounted above the immense glass doors of the tall, aged, red-brick building behind me.

   My train leaves at 6 in the afternoon, but it was only 4:55 now.

Perhaps it was a better Idea to wait inside for the next hour, but the snow was beautiful and honestly I like to watch the stuff float around and fall.

The ponies around me were more interesting to pay attention to though.

They were all unwritten books full of unwritten pages, but they were also books I couldn't read without talking to, and even if I tried I couldn't talk to them all.  So I imagine things about them instead.

All these colts and mares, whether they were young or old, were lives filled with memories and futures and pasts.  They're full of loves and lusts, full of lights and new existences, full of things both sorrowful and joyous that I didn't know about, and that made me feel so small and so amazed at the same time.

I only have to see them from afar, and dream their lives in my head, like spotting islands in the distance of a blank and suffering ocean.

There's a psychological word for my little hobby; to stare and observe, and wonder and create things about other people's lives, but I can never remember what the heck the word was.

The cold eventually started getting to me after awhile, and I was beginning to get absolutely fed up with it.  I hung around my platform, walking and watching and imagining.  Eventually I wised up enough to walk back inside the station building.

   I took a look at the clock again as I neared the door.

5:23 P.M.

My train was still not here.

I opened the tall glass by the handle and sauntered inside with snow still thinly caking my back and hanging loosely on strands of my rose hair.  I shook off what I could and took a look around.

The interior of the station building was magnificent, and it's air breathed comforting warmth to the frozen from the outside.

Colossal columns sprung from the polished marble floors and stretched growing like trees into the grandiose ceiling.

Golden chandeliers of electric lights dangled aloft and aflame far above my head, tacked in gold to the plaster top.

The ceiling was stilted high, and serenely painted with images of folk lore and famous events.

I picked out one by one the stories I could recognize.

The Banishing,

The forgotten mare,

The fall of the Discordian era,

Lunar return,

The becoming of Princess Twilight,

The Leviathan's maze,

   and the last few I couldn't recognize, so I decided to ignored them.

I glanced to the higher of the north wall, and there was a grand stained-glass window depicting the second fall of King Sombra, with a little purple and green dragon holding a shining crystal heart above his head.

Above the main entrance doors standing in the south end of the building, the words 'The Storybook Station' were embalmed in stunning bronze on the marble wall.

Among the gleaming walls, carved vines of green and yellow flowed and enveloped the whole of the station in elapsing patterns, and with the vines, resting on the leaves and the stems were birds, fairies, twig elves, and pixie bears, with many other assorted characters masterfully illustrated eternally into the flesh of the marble.

This building was the spawn of someone with a great imagination, I'll give 'em that.

I surveyed amongst the waiting clumps of crowds and benches looking for the phone boxes.  I saw them next to the ticket counters and I trotted towards them, dumping my now empty paper drinking cup away in a trash bin.

I passed next to a large column on my way and slowed my pace.  I touched my left hoof to the stature and slowly moved forward, admiring the twine callous hidden in the marble.

The sounds around me sank.

The feel of the absent texture riding sulkily under my hoof had, to me, stopped time itself.  I had halted the movement of the arm of a clock-face filtered by the death wound of the universe.

I breathed out longingly, but not within the world.  Now I was the only one who could hear myself.

Then I placed my hoof down and started walking normally again towards the phone booths, passing by stranger after stranger.

Nothing had happened.

I stepped into a phone box and closed the door behind me.  The cacophony of the station became muffled behind the clear Plexiglas I encased myself in.  I opened my duffel bag and fished out a few bits from my purse, then I picked up the phone and pinched it between my shoulder and my head.  I slid the bits into the coin slot, grabbed a pen hanging attached by a ball-cord from the receiver box, and I picked at the number dials.

6-5-9-9-3  2-4   1-1-5-8-0-9

I dropped the pen and held up the phone to the right side on my head.

It rang a droning static bell for a few seconds before there was a click on the other end, and a familiar mellow voice lulled softly into my ear.

"Hello?"

"Hey!"  I responded.

"Roseluck?  Is that you?"

"Yeah, I'm still at the station in Haysville.  My train hasn't arrived yet so I just thought I'd call in and see if you survived the holidays."

I heard a laugh on the other end of the line that felt as if it shot melting splinters thickly into the side of my echoing skull.

  He had barely said anything to me over the phone and in three seconds of that laughter he had given me everything I'd ever've needed to hear in my entire life.

"Yeah, I survived another year Rosey.  How was Hearth's Warming slash New Years with your folks?"

"It was good!  Dad just slept on his couch.  I helped out mom with most of the work; cooking, decorating, all that jazz.  My brother's doing fine I suppose, although college isn't really liking him as much as he thought it would've, but yeah my family's doing great!  They also told me to tell you happy Hearth's Warming and New Years by the way."

"Likewise."

"Hmm.  So, you open your present yet?"

"Nah, I'm waiting for you to get back home so I can open it with you."

"Heh, you loser."  I scoffed gently.

"I'm still the loser you fell in love with, and hey, if your gonna give me that 'tude' I guess I'll just open your gift now."

"Open that present before I get home and we'll see how much I love you then, honey."

...

We talked for a good maybe ten minutes, he and I.

Then, inevitably, minutes started to fall fast, and soon enough I was about to run out of time for the call.

A loud bell chanted once from the teleprompter outside the phone box.

"Up, hold on..."  I said, stopping our conversation abruptly.

I opened the phone box's door and poked my head back into the station to get a better hear of the announcement.

A mares voice showered the station like sultry rain breaching from the ceiling.

"Train heading eastward, train heading eastward has arrived at transit platform A.

The train will be leaving for Marilytown, Canterlot, Ponyville, and ending at Shire Hill in twenty minutes.

All those who are to board for any of these destinations must now make their way to transit platform A.

Thank you."

I glanced around for a clock and found one attached by screws to a column.

5:41 p.m.

I closed the phone box door.

"I gotta go, my train just arrived."

"Yeah okay, meet you at the station back in Ponyville."

"Okay."  I replied.

There was a short silence...

then I said, "I love you."

I could hear his freakin' smirk from halfway across the country.

He said, "I love you too."

A little bump kicked in my neck as I listened to his lapsed voice, and I broke into a sweet, quite smile.

"Bye."

"Goodbye."

click

***

"Tickets please."

A young mare and her kid gave their tickets to the conductor sitting on a stool.  The older, salt and pepper bearded stallion took the tickets and held them tightly in his hooves, then he took out a hole-puncher out of his vest pocket, and held it with experience in his jaw as he clipped a hole in both the tickets.  He gently put the tool back in his pocket and smiled as he said, "Enjoy the ride." giving the slips of paper back to the couple.

The two shuffled right and entered the train car together, escaping with them the freezing wind that had significantly picked up while I was inside the station.

I was shivering badly.  I hate shivering.

I cautiously stepped up to the conductor who sat patiently on his wooden seat next to the back entrance door of the train car.

The concrete of the transit platform sunk behind and under me to be amoungst the stifling flurries of falling snow.

"Ticket please, m'am."

I glanced at the colt before me.  He was only wearing his red conductor's vest and yet he barely seemed to notice the cold he was drowning in.

I flashed a quivering smile, with only a slight touch of envy.

"Of course." I replied.

I shakily brought my head to my duffel bag and opened it.  I stuck my nose inside and shifted around for my ticket.  Once I found it I clenched it between my clattering teeth and pulled it out, but I didn't bite down as hard as I thought I did.

As the paper slip reached the air around my lips the wind took the ticket within it's gusts and flew it back towards the platform and into the line of ponies behind me.

"OH NO!"

A few of the ponies tried to grab at the ticket, but they missed and let it fly away above them.  Then the slip passed the crowd and fell low to the platform floor, swimming amoungst the flurrying snow.

I panicked and hopped back onto the car steps, cutting backwards into the line.

"Excuse me, Sorry!  Excuse me!"

I jumped back onto the platform and dashed towards the ticket rushing low within the tuffs of breeze.  I was bumping and yelling past strangers as I hurried by them.

"Sorry!  Sorry!  MY TICKET!  Excuse me.  HEY!"

The ticket flew faster and started to get farther and farther away from me, rushing down to the tail of my eastbound train.

As I escaped the crowd of the massed line of travelers I bee-lined towards the wind that had stolen my one way back to Ponyville, and still in my galloping stride to get closer my ticket flew still feet away from me.

When I had finally gotten close the gust took it upward, and taller than I could reach.  I slowed down, knowing that it was lost now.

I huffed in defeated sighs and groaned,

"No..."

I watched it fly upwards.  Five feet, six feet, seven feet, eight feet, THWIP!!!

A stick quickly swiped the ticket down and pinned it in a pile of snow.  I stopped in sudden pause, staring at the pink paper slip now bent in half under what was actually a violin or a cello bow.

A gentle hoof went down and stepped on my ticket.  An old head bent down, and in a timid jaw he grabbed the bow.

A small elderly colt, a light gray Pegasus even smaller than I was stood before me.  His hair was an azure white from wounded age and distant color, and his limbs were strung like the twine of willow trees.  His wings were brittle by the bone, and you could see his flattered skin lapse thinly under his unkempt feathers that grew out of place in spiderwebs of crazed tuffs.

I looked at his face.  His frail jawline held a quaint smile between the instrument bow, and a pair of dark green eyes stared down at the ticket.

Then he looked to me, holding his smile.  His face was wrinkled, and it was wrinkled in the way in which one had been smiling on for decades.  That was the best kind of wrinkled face, one that made someone look happy all the time.

He tucked the bow into a tan saddle bag he wore on his right side and cleared his throat.

"Is this yours?"  He asked in a chilled, croaking voice.  Referring to the ticket pinched in the snow under his hoof.

"Yes."  I quietly replied.

"Hmph."

He looked down at the slip dryly, then turned back to me.

"I suppose you need it back then, huh?"

I just simply nodded my head.

"Humph..phmh... Okay then."

The old colt gingerly bent down and bit the ticket.  He lifted his head back up and then did something I wasn't quite expecting.

Instead of plainly walking to me, he hobbled.  He lifted his left, back leg up and sharply and slowly hopped towards me.

I looked at him for a few seconds as he feebly made his way closer to me.

In sudden realization I hurriedly trotted to him, still somewhat fiercely shivering.  When we met close I took my ticket from him, making an effort to hold a tighter grip in my bite.

"Thanksyew" I squeaked, muzzled through my closed teeth.

"It's no problem, dear."  He said.

I found myself then glancing him over again and found that he wasn't wearing any coat, or shoes, or scarf or hat.  He was practically naked in the freezing cold!

I crooked my head to my bag and stashed my ticket back inside, then turned to him and asked, "Aren't you cold at all, sir?"

"Hmm?"

"Cold, aren't you cold?  You're not wearing anything to keep you warm and it's like ten degrees out here."

"Oh," Then he lifted his hoof to his mouth and cleared his throat, "My dear if you've been to the places I've been, and seen the things I've seen, a little cold weather and snow is simply like a pebble at the foot of the tallest of mountains in comparison."

A rough gust of wind blew on top of us, and with it a yelping howl came with it as it flowed crashing into the soundless ground.

I winced as it passed through through my jacket and into my skin, sinking poisonously into my bones, but he, the old Pegasus, stood his ground unshaken.

I heard him as he laughed softly before he asked, "What is your name, my dear?"

I looked to his face.  The curves and billowing skin wrapping loosely around his eyes looked as if they had been painted gently onto the caverns of his skull.  His irises, the color of a deep evergreen soul, lighted in reflected white by an electric bulb above us, gripped tightly my attention as he saw me staring scarce in my words.

"Roseluck." I answered.

"Roseluck," he repeated, "Do you happen to know where the train to Shire Hill is?"

"Yeah, that's the same train I'm taking.  It's right next to us."

I pointed my hoof to the train to the right, still filled with golden light and filling more with frosted passengers.

"Ah, wonderful."

The old stallion shuttered his wings and his shoulders.

"Well I certainly hope you enjoy your ride back to wherever you're going, my dear."

"Likewise, sir."

He started hobbling past and away from me, and I just stood still.  Soon enough as he made his way farther from me, he became a silhouette wrapped in the falling snow, the shadows of the overcast sky of grey, and the heavy steam of taming water spewing from the heat of the train.

"Have a good evening!" I heard him roughly shout.

"You too."