I couldn’t believe my eyes and yet the image still remained. My dreams have come true, my wildest wishes were real and staring right at me.
The cool breeze upon my face that gently ruffled at the mass of messy black hair carried the scent of flowers. The wet grass slipped through my fingers and dampened my grasp. The sun shined down onto my outstretched legs, warming my jeans. I was in a place that wasn’t my own, a new and familiar place, and it was very real.
I wasn’t entirely sure yet how I got here, and I wasn’t quite sure yet where ‘here’ was. One moment I was walking back to my car after a day’s hike through the forest, and then I wake up slumped against a tree upon a hill overlooking a town that made my heart skip several beats.
Ponyville.
Try as I might I couldn’t feel the sensations of any dream, lucid or otherwise. Willing myself awake had no affect and a twist of my own nose showed that I still felt pain. Wasn’t one of my best ideas to twist my own nose so hard a second time but I had to be sure at what I saw. It was still there each time, that fabled place that any brony could ever dream of was right before my eyes. All I had to do was walk down the hill and I would be there. It’d be an easy motion to pick myself up and venture towards a place that I could only hope to visit in my dreams and yet I couldn’t bring myself to move.
I simply sat there, dumbfounded, mouth agape and successfully catching flies. I was scared moving anymore would break the illusion or that this was the effects of some drug my roommate had managed to sneak into my water bottle before I left. It was unlikely but I’m always wary for slips of mysterious paper in my drink after that one time at Applebee’s. What halted my body the most though was fear. I was afraid to disturb the tranquil scene with my motion, I couldn’t move towards the single happiest place that has ever graced my eyes.
The fear that held me the most though, was that I was scared to feel happy, to truly know in my heart that everything was going to be alright being in a place like Ponyille. I mean I was human, wondrous things like this simply didn’t happen to me! It had to be some cruel joke that my own mind was playing against me; I’ve gotten drunk and stumbled to my death. It was always the classic way for the males in my own family to go so I suppose it wasn’t any different for me. I mean my own grandfather drank himself to death, and before that, his father got drunk and wandered onto a highway, and his father before that killed himself by getting drunk and having the bright idea of mixing bleach and ammonia together then huffing the stuff. Hell, I had a Great-Uncle who decided on his eighty-fourth birthday to end it all by chugging a bottle of vodka, jabbing a pointy stick at a bear, and then letting nature do the rest, true story. So it was definitely not the strangest way to die, but probably the oddest place for a soul to end up in.
Suffice to say, amazing things like this simply don’t happen to me. I don’t end up in the most joyful and colorful place to ever grace the human imagination, and yet here I was, absolutely terrified to get off my sorry rear end and taking the first step forward. With slowly gained resolve I dumbly, like a newborn, I managed to pick myself up. I was nervous, at least that’s what my body kept telling me as it wouldn’t stop shaking like I was having a seizure. Taking in a deep breathe of courage I found to my silent delight that I could catch the sweet scent of apples in the air along with flowers, breathing out I felt my body slowly calm down.
With confident and clumsy steps I walked down the hill towards the town. I was proud to say I only stumbled when I got near the bottom and that I barely needed to roll at all to get to the bottom. Quickly rebounding back upon my two less than trustworthy feet I brushed off my pants and shirt of grass and took a look around to see if any pony saw my embarrassing tumble. Nope, just me and some ducks.
“Right then! I made it down the hill, now what?” I asked the ducks.
Unsurprisingly the duck just quacked at me because it was a duck and ducks don’t talk, that’d just be plain silly, like talking rabbits kind of silly.
Turning upon my heels I walked away from those ducks. Well I took two steps, tripped on a rock, and fell into the grass again, but quickly I jumped back up and acted like it never happened. I’m pretty sure the ducks started laughing at me if the riotous quacking behind me was an indication of such. I chose to ignore my cruel feathery observers and take my first steps into Ponyville.
The first thing to greet me was a face full of letters that fell from the sky.
Gently removing a letter addressed to the Cakes from my line of sight I looked up to where the letters fell and nearly dropped the letter. Up above, waving down at me with an adorable smile on her face was Ditzy Doo, affectionately known as Derpy Hooves. I realize now what weaponized cuteness meant, if I hadn’t been so shocked to finally see my beloved pony in person I would have fallen face first against the ground again and not get up again due to the rupture in my heart organ.
She flew off then, a trail of letters gently cascading behind her. The stupid grin on my face couldn’t get any bigger. I move to grab the letters that have fallen, slowly following the grey mare thanks to the papery trail she left behind. All the while other ponies saw me and smiled, waving and cheerfully greeting me. I thought for certain they’d be terrified to see me yet not even the look of apprehension crossed their faces when they saw me. All I could do was smile and wave back, trying my best to stop giggling like a madman.
I worked diligently to catch the letters as they fell, racing through Ponyville without a care in the world. So elated was I that I barely stopped before I collided with a very pink pony. The grin she gave me I somehow managed to match in intense delight and happiness. She gave a loud gasp and lunged forward at me, wrapping me in a hug that I quickly gave back.
“Oh my gosh! You’re here! You’re finally here, Nihilos!” Pinkie Pie shouted in her happy-go-lucky voice.
“Ah I there isn’t any place I’d very well rather be Pinkie!” I happily said back to her.
“You know what this means, right?!”
“I’m sure I do!”
“This calls for…”
“A PARTY!” We shouted in unison, casting our arms into the air as confetti burst from Pinkie Pie’s mane and the letters in my hands fell back to the ground again. I open my eyes again and to my surprise I see Pinkie Pie wasn’t the only one there now. They were all there. Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and even Fluttershy were all there smiling back at me! I felt like crying from such joy and Pinkie seemed to sense it as she managed to pull me back into another hug. Our hug quickly grew into a group hug, their laughter mixing with my own.
Here I was in Ponyville, it was all here! I was in Ponyville.
“I’m in Ponyville… I really am in Ponyville,” the man in the straitjacket muttered in the center of his sponge covered room. He kept on absently muttering these same words as two orderlies looked in on him from outside the yellow cushioned cell.
One of the men tsked several times before speaking, “Damn shame. So what’s his story?”
The other man took the clipboard that hung on the door and read the top few lines, “Well turns out this bloke was out in the forest durin’ a thunderstorm. Apparently he got struck by lightning, scratch that he got struck by lightning twice, fell into a ravine, and was later picked up by Forest Rangers when they found him collecting rocks. It took about six of them to restraint him because he simply tried to keep hugging them.”
“Huh, weird. So is he stuck like that or what?”
“Naw, says here the doctors think he’s just in an ‘extreme case of confusion’ thanks to the trauma and bashing his head open. CAT scans show he doesn’t have any brain damage so he should recover in a manner of time.”
“Hm. You know I sort of feel bad, I mean he looks really, really happy right now talking about ponies or something.”
“Yeah… Gonna suck when he figures out it wasn’t real.”
“Talk about bad luck.”
“Well hey, at least he isn’t dead!”
