(Un)Healthy Obsession

My wife and I decided to stop at Olive Garden for an impromptu dinner before heading home.  It was just down the street from the mall and caught both of our attentions at the same time.  We treated the simultaneous glances as a sign and snagged a parking spot near the front door, hurrying inside for no reason other than to burn a bit of our uncommon energy.

A very young waiter, probably ten years younger than me, led us to a table for two in the back of the restaurant.  We hadn’t eaten out for a very long time, even longer than we had gone without holding hands.  But there we sat at a chain restaurant, commenting on the décor as our hands played over each other at the center of the tiny table.  I couldn’t imagine feeling any happier.

We ordered a plate of grilled chicken parmesan pasta to share.  She had never been one to eat much, and I was being careful.  It was easier than ever to eat only what I needed.

Well, that’s not exactly true.  The temptation to eat more and more was just as prevalent as it had always been, ever since elementary school.  But I had the means and desire to control it now; to bridle my passions, if you’ll pardon the pony pun.

“I am so proud of you,” Crystal suddenly said, adding a vocal witness to the approving gleam I often noticed in her eye.

“I know you are,” I admitted.  “Thank you.”

“Really, though, Tom,” she said emphatically, clasping one of my hands between both of hers, “you amaze me.  Who would have thought that a show for little girls—”

“Hey!”

“—could be just what you needed to make a change?”

“It’s not for little girls,” I quipped automatically before donning a heartfelt smile of gratitude.  “And don’t give all the credit to the show.  You’ve been my inspiration all along.”

She slapped my wrist and rolled her eyes.  “Oh, don’t give me that.  We dated for nearly a year before the show even aired, and you seemed perfectly happy with the way you looked back then.”

“Then call it a catalyst,” I offered with a shrug, “but you’re the rising action.”

She smirked at my filmmaker’s lingo.  “Can’t I be the climax?”

I pulled an apologetic face.  “Sorry, babe, I think Rarity already called dibs on that one.”

Crystal choked on a laugh and pulled her hands away from mine.  “That is disgusting, Tom.”

“I’m joking!” I said in a high pitched voice, lifting my hands innocently.  She shook her head while she laughed, letting her short blonde curls bounce beautifully around her face.  We continued to banter and flirt while I paid for the meal and we left the Olive Garden happily and healthily full.

The drive home was quiet and comfortable.  My wife and I had a way of avoiding “awkward moments,” as the annoying saying goes.  Both of us were perfectly at ease with silence.  It had been one of the first similarities we noticed that we shared.  Neither of us said a word until we had pulled into the garage and unbuckled our seatbelts, at which point she asked how much work I had that night.

“I’d like to write a good ten pages,” I said worriedly.  Writer’s block had been cruel to me for the past week or so; my goal of six pages a day was faltering.  “Maybe edit the fourth scene.  It might take three hours.”

We slid out of the car and walked up three cement steps.  I opened the door to our rented house for Crystal; she nodded in thanks for my “chivalry.”  That’s what she called it, anyway.

“Well, try not to take too long,” she cooed in a sultry tone as I shut the door behind me.  Unexpectedly, she pressed herself against my left side and whispered into my ear, so close that I could feel her lips brush against its skin.  If I had wings, they would have risen.

“I think I’ll just skip work tomorrow morning.”

I gulped as she pulled away, teasing me further with an expert wink.  She was in another room and out of sight before my body finally relaxed enough to move.  That’s what I had missed.  Sexy Crystal.  The Crystal who wanted me as husband; not just as a best friend or constant companion, though I loved being both, but as a husband.  Wink-wink included.

I stumbled to my tiny office, trying desperately to turn my mind back to the screenplay at hand.  It was my third attempt at a feature-length manuscript.  Up to that point, I had made my living writing short films, many of which won awards and publicity at festivals around the world.  My first feature-length work was purchased and heavily revised by an indie group in Utah.  The produced film had garnered surprising success in Australia; its sequel, my second feature-length screenplay, brought in enough money to rent our house.

And now, a real agent from California had asked me, specifically, to put together an original adventure film in six months.  The due date was only two months away, and I was struggling to wrap up the second act.  Most of the third act was already written, however—I knew how I wanted the story to end, but for one reason or another, the middle wouldn’t click.

I sat in front of my iMac and opened the digital document.  Halfheartedly, I read through the last two completed pages of the second act for what must have been the thousandth time, wracking my mind for a creative burst.  The rusty gears of imagination ground fruitlessly inside my skull.  Breathing deeply from my flattened abdomen, I closed my eyes and tried to envision the established action…

There stood the young police officer, hateful tears dripping from his eyes onto the warehouse floor.  His mother was screaming from the other side of the vast, empty room, held in the clutches of the film’s eponymous antagonist, Sam O'Thell.  Sam was one of my favorite characters: I created him at a very young age, before elementary school, as the exact opposite of me.  He was bone thin with thick dark hair sprouting out of his head in spiky tufts; his dark green eyes shone with madness, his mouth twisted eternally into a wide, wicked grin.

Movies about villains were growing in popularity, ever since Heath Ledger’s onscreen portrayal of the Joker.  Sam O'Thell had always been a terribly fun character for me to draw or write about, but it wasn’t until My Little Pony’s Season 2 introduction of Discord that I got the idea to create an entire story based on Sam’s background and descent into madness.  The agent from California had fallen in love with the idea when I presented it to him over the phone; the samples of the script I had sent him over the months were lauded with praise.  But writing a meaningful, consistently entertaining, two-hour film about a man’s brilliant insanity was difficult to say the least.

Back in the realm of my imagination, Sam cackled with glee.  “Choose wisely, Officer.  We wouldn’t want anypony to get hurt, now, would we?”

Anypony?  I shook my head and let Sam repeat his line.

“…anybody to get hurt, now, would we?”

“Let her go!  Please, I’ll do anything!”

“Call them off!” Sam chirped, widening his glossy eyes.  “Make them all go away!  Let me escape without one of your men touching a hair of my mane, and I promise from the bottom of my heart to…”

Mane?  I grunted at myself, opening my eyes and staring at the written line of Sam’s dialogue.

“Hair of my head,” I read aloud, sighing heavily through my nose.  My thoughts were obviously somewhere else.

I couldn’t blame them, though.  Some of the reasons I loved Friendship is Magic so much was its brilliant storyline, its in-universe consistency, its believable dialogue.  Weight-loss wasn’t the only field the show had inspired for me.  My writing was becoming more and more influenced by MLP’s.  I knew it, and I liked it.  The team of writers behind the show was far more talented than me, anyway.

I shut my eyes again, letting my mind off the leash.  Almost instantly, I was in Ponyville.  The artistic landscape and abstract buildings brought a dreamy smile to my face.

With a disappointed grunt directed at myself, I minimized the Sam Oht document and opened Google Chrome, clicking on the EqD bookmark along the top of my screen.  Just a few fanfics, I told myself.  For inspiration.  Don’t get carried away.

Three hours later, I dragged myself miserably out of my office.  Although I had ended up editing the fourth scene, I still hadn’t decided how Officer Guillone was going to react to Sam’s demands.  What would he really do?  I kept asking myself.  Would he order the squadron surrounding the warehouse to stand down and let Sam escape unscathed, or would he risk his mother’s life to arrest the elusive villain?  Either way, how would it lead to the ending I had already written?

Crystal was reading a magazine in our bed.  I squinted through the dim light to read the title, but she hid it under her pillow before I got a good look.

I smirked.  “Keeping secrets?” I asked unthreateningly.

She wiggled her head in a so-so way.  “Not for long,” she promised, slinking out from under the covers and fluidly crossing the room to where I stood.  She kissed me under my right ear.  “How did writing go?”

“Not great,” I mumbled, shuddering as her fingers danced over my ribcage.

“Well, you can’t be great at everything,” she said.  “Now that you’ve hit your target weight—”

“Passed it, actually.”

“—you can go back to writing every…”  Kiss.  “…single…”  Kiss.  “…day…”

“Crystal,” I barely whimpered.  She put a dainty finger over my lips while an excited smile twitched at the corners of hers.

“Let’s see what that new waist of yours can do.”

The man closed his laptop with a content sigh.  Another day, another dollar.

“And if I keep staying in these kinds of hotels,” he reminded himself, “that’s not gonna be enough.”

Of course, he was a good enough writer to get several jobs a week, and each optimization paid very well for what it was.  Even then, hotels weren’t cheap.  Well, cheap hotels were cheap, but he refused to stay in those.  If he wanted to pursue a normal life, sooner or later he’d have to settle down in an apartment or something.

“Hotels are easier,” he told himself, rising from the king size bed and stretching noisily toward the ceiling.  After a jaw-popping yawn, he glanced at the digital clock on his bedside counter.  11:31.

“Cool,” he mumbled, scratching the scalp beneath his chocolate-brown hair.  “Still morning.”  Maybe he’d get another visit.  Two in one day?  That had never happened before.

After going to the bathroom, he decided to go out and have an early lunch.  Or late breakfast.  Whatever.  He wasn’t even that hungry—he was never very hungry—but his lips were starting to chap and his pee was getting painfully dark, and he wasn’t about to spend his life’s savings on the hotel room’s bottled water.  He spread a clumping wax through his hair, straightened out his grey skinny jeans, realigned the V of his black shirt, and swung the door open on his way to the elevator.

As he was stepping through the doorway from his room to the hall, his hands automatically checked all four of his pockets—if anything was missing, he would have spun around on his heels and found it.  As it were, all pockets were properly filled: his front-right saved his cell phone, front-left held his headphones, back-right watched his wallet, and back-left kept his key.  Donning a subconsciously satisfied grin, he walked down the hallway and requested the elevator with a push of a button.

The round button had been used so many times its down arrow had faded away completely, if it ever had one.  When pressed, a white backlight softly illuminated the plastic.  The man’s eyes studied the brightened button for a moment as the elevator came down from the fifth floor.  It sort of looked like a glowing marshmallow that had been shoved 5/6 of the way into a hole in the wall.  He chuckled at the imagery of a mischievous janitor cramming a sugary treat into the surrounding silver plate.

The backlight disappeared as the elevator drew near.  The man’s eyes widened as the white plastic took on an even more marshmallowy appearance without the glow.

White.

The elevator doors opened just as the man slapped himself in the face, trying to stop the triggered visit.  Not her!  Not now!  Not in this outfit!

“Well, I never!” cried a voice from inside the elevator.  The man groaned.

“Please go away.  Send Twilight instead.  I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“What?  Young man, what are you talking about?”

His eyes darted up to meet the speaker’s.  A plump woman in a furry, brownish coat stood indignantly against the back wall of the elevator.

“Oh!” he cried excitedly, strangely accompanied by a relieved sigh.  “Sorry, lady, I thought you were someone else.”

He boarded the moving box with a silly grin, rubbing his reddened right cheek sheepishly.

“What did you do that for?” the other passenger asked with a hint of distress in her voice.  She was pressed firmly against the wall now, keeping as far from the skeletal, self-abusive boy as she could.

“What, the slap?” he clarified with a single burst of laughter.  “I was trying to stay focused.  Looks like it worked.”

Visibly flustered, the woman straightened her coat and averted her eyes to the ceiling without a reply.  He didn’t mind.  She seemed like a really annoying person that he probably wouldn’t like.

“Well, that’s not very nice,” chided a second womanly voice from behind the man.  His smile drooped as his eyebrows rose toward his hairline.  “You seem quite untaken with the notion of my arrival.”

Nearly petrified with shock, the man slowly turned his neck to peek at the space behind him.  Sure enough, a small, white unicorn with a dazzlingly styled violet mane stood proudly in his shadow, shooting him a stern look with her giant eyes of royal blue.

“What the hay are you doing here?” he accidentally asked aloud.

“I beg your pardon?” asked the woman in the corner.

“I’m paying a visit to a dear friend of mine who I thought would be even the teensiest bit excited to see me as well, but it seems very apparent to me now that I was ever so wrong about that.  Hmmf.”  Rarity plopped onto her hindquarters and crossed her front legs, sticking out her bottom lip in a dramatic pout.

The man apologized succinctly to the woman.  The elevator doors opened and she hurried out in a huff.

“Well,” Rarity commented, “either she has someplace to be, or you have a knack for insulting women.”

The man bounced on his heels as he waited for the elevator doors to close again, praying that no one would climb aboard.  Finally, the doors slid shut and he found himself alone.  With an imaginary magical horse.

He spun around and glared furiously at the suddenly startled unicorn.  “WHAT IN LUNA’S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” he screamed.

Rarity’s pupils shrunk as she scooted away from the man.  “My goodness, there’s no need to get so upset…”

“HOW DID YOU DO THAT?” he bellowed.  The veins of his neck began to swell.

“Do what, darling?”

“HOW DID YOU SHOW UP WITH SOMEONE ELSE IN HERE?”  He gestured to the elevator all around them erratically.

Rarity scoffed.  “Is that what you’re getting so worked up about?  Well, you can hardly blame me for that, now, can you?  It’s not as if I have much of a say in the matter.  In fact, I was just about to retrieve Opalescence from Fluttershy when you requested a visit.  And of course, being the selfless and generous pony that I am, I simply couldn’t ignore the invitation.”

A guttural screech wiggled through his clenched teeth as his eyes seethed over the figment.  “I didn’t invite you, Rarity.  I never invite any of you.  You just show up!  Out of NOWHERE!”

“Oh, please, Ryker, we both know that’s not true,” she went on with a casual flick of her hoof.  “Besides, Applejack just finished telling me that you told her that you love our visits and want us to come more often.”

“I… wasn’t really…”  He squeezed his eyelids shut and took a deep breath, trying to calm down.  After a painful punch on the wall to his left, he released the air and looked back to Rarity with significantly calmer features.

“Sorry, Rarity,” he said sincerely.  “I’ve never seen any of you while other people are around before.  It just scared me.”

“Oh, Ryker, I understand,” the elegant pony assured, rising to all fours.  “I’m sure it must be very difficult to come to terms with one’s own insanity.  Perhaps I should let somepony else take my place, one who better understands your predicament.  Pinkie Pie comes to mind.”

He laughed at the expression of good-natured mischief she had slowly donned through her spiel.  “No, why don’t you stay a while,” he encouraged.  “Especially now that you can stick around when other people are watching.”

“I would be honored,” she said with a dainty smile.

Ryker reopened the elevator doors and stepped into the hotel lobby, glancing back to see if his pony friend was following.  Indeed, Rarity trotted along behind him, ogling the overhead chandeliers with radiant fascination.

“Where should we eat this morning?” he asked her quietly, careful not to draw attention to himself from the hotel’s other patrons.

“Well, this is the equivalent of Manehattan, is it not?” she reminded him with a toss of her mane.  “We simply must go somewhere dignified and original.  Perhaps a nice French-themed café.  Oh, and darling, we simply must go shopping before I leave.  These outfits of yours are always so drab…”