Obituaries, darling, obituaries.
Beyond The Grave
Twilight Sparkle.
How does… How does one describe Twilight Sparkle? How can one truly and sincerely hope to capture on paper a pony as interesting as she?
I never knew how to do so in life, and now in death, I still don’t. But I shall try.
I am dead, I should say. It admittedly slipped my mind to establish this rather vital fact, but if you have lived a life as long as mine, then you’ve learned a few things, including the fact that details hardly matter in the grand scheme of things. Details such as my death, or the fact that I am somehow communicating with you from beyond the grave. Were I Twilight Sparkle, these trivial things would matter.
But I am not.
And I digress.
Here is another fact, those silly little things that Twilight adored to embellish my life with.
Twilight Sparkle did not love me.
We met, we dated, and we were together up until the day I died, and as I sit—or write, more accurately—before you, I can sincerely say that Twilight Sparkle never loved me.
Twilight Sparkle accepted me.
Does that make sense? It sounds so off-putting, doesn’t it? Or, more than off-putting, it sounds wrong to say the love of my life merely accepted me into hers, but that’s how it was.
That’s how it would be because my dear darling lived too consumed by her thoughts to think otherwise.
I loved her. She accepted me. I was fine with that.
Death is a marvellously fascinating concept, is it not?
“But why?” I asked her once as we lay on our bed, my head rested on her barrel as she read a book. If I may confess, for in death what secrets are there to keep, I knew the answer myself, but I revelled in asking Twilight questions.
It made her happy.
Now, where was I?
“But why?” I asked, turning on my side, listening to the unbecoming sounds of her gurgling stomach. “Why is death so captivating?”
“Because we don’t know what happens after it,” she offered, turning a page of her book and continuing to read. “Nopony knows what comes after death.”
Well! I do now, and might I confess it is uneventful. The tea is delicious, but beyond that…
“Well,” I said, as I did when I wanted to be terribly smart and impress her, “I believe it is not death that fascinates us, but whether it will be meaningful.”
Her ears flicked. “I read in a book that what ponies fear the most when dying is to realize they didn’t have a meaningful life” she said, and she looked to me and offered a teasing smile. “Are you going through an existential crisis, Rarity?”
“Me? Never,” I replied, aghast. “Your mere presence prevents that.”
She laughed at this, and it was soft, and quiet, and intimate. To make her laugh was akin to being the main feature of Vanity Hooves’ yearly compendium.
“Because you love me?”
“Precisely.”
We had a lovely picnic that week.
Daisy sandwiches, two bottles of wine, the finest chocolate from Saddle Arabia, and just the two of us. I once again found myself resting my head on her barrel, her satisfied stomach no longer producing those awful sounds.
“Twilight,” I asked suddenly, “do you love me?”
She hesitated. I felt it in her body, in the breathing that stopped and allowed me a perfectly still view of the distant houses. She hesitated in saying she loved me, and it hurt, but not as much as I thought it would.
I already knew it, didn’t I?
“I don’t know,” she said finally, a shamed confession turned brave by the mere fact it had been voiced. “I mean, I do? I love you. Or I don’t know. It’s hard. I don’t want to be anywhere else, and when you left for a week for Manehattan, I missed you so much, but…”
The breeze moved through the trees, through my mane and through my coat. I breathed in and out, and finally I sat up.
“Ra-Rarity?” she asked, torn between lying down and sitting up. To sit up would mean that something was indeed wrong. Her ears lowered, and she asked me in a pained voice, “Why did you ask that?”
“I simply wanted you to say it,” I replied, my gaze set on some foals running around in the distance.
“W-What?”
I turned to her with a loving smile, and I leaned down to offer an even more loving kiss. Before she could question me, I nuzzled against her, leaving a kiss on her jaw before closing my eyes.
“I wanted you to say it,” I whispered, content in her arms, “so you would stop worrying that my love for you is conditional.”
Fate plays cruel tricks on us all, but it does, on occasion, make up for them.
Severe earthquakes, you see, are not very common in Ponyville, so nopony really expected Carousel Boutique to collapse with me still in it, least of all me when I woke up in the hospital with several broken bones and no recollection of the past day.
So it would seem that my tea time dates with Death were nothing more than some sort of coma dream? I’m rather unclear on that as well. I was a bit under the weather when the doctor was explaining. A side-effect of dying for a moment, I imagine.
“So?!” Rainbow Dash asked, shaking my hospital bed as Twilight quietly frowned at this. “Did you see anything?! You were, like, dead! What’s on the other side?!”
I blinked at her. “Darling, I really don’t remember.”
I was lying, of course. I thought of Twilight, even then.
“Uuuuuuugh!” she groaned, shaking her head. “Come on, Rares, if you’re gonna scare us like that, you could at least have a cool story out of it!”
I laughed. “You’re terribly right! How truly inconsiderate of me.”
“Rainbow,” said Twilight with severity. “Can you go out and see if the girls are here?”
“Huh? Oh, sure!” she replied, heading towards the door. “Do you want something from the candy bar, Rares?”
“No, she doesn’t,” Twilight sternly replied, and I was reminded of the absolutely dreadful tray of ‘food’ waiting for me on my bedstand.
It wasn’t until Rainbow Dash left, the door swinging to a close behind her, that Twilight and I were finally alone for the first time since my accident. She spoke first, quickly and methodically, explaining to me in immense detail my future accomodations in the castle until my boutique was rebuilt.
There was no sweeping gesture, no rushing into my forelegs to reassert a newly-discovered undying love, no bringing me flowers and kissing me until I fainted. Nothing like that, and instead just a plan of action for us living together that was detailed to the extreme.
Too detailed, in fact.
“Twilight,” I interrupted in the middle of her detailing our potential morning routine pending revisions and approval, “When did you—Did you come up with all of this while I was here? This is—”
“No,” she replied. “I’ve been planning for this since last year.”
“Last year? You’ve been planning this for over a year and didn’t tell me at all?” I gasped, and before I could stop myself, I said, “But, Twilight, I thought you didn’t know if you loved me.”
Finally, her eyes teared up and she regaled me with a small smile.
“I thought so too.”
Author's Note
Back in 2016, I was in an accident where I was clinically dead for like 3 minutes, and ever since then, I think about death constantly. Not in a bad way, I just think about it. An odd fascination, I guess.
"All I know are sad songs, sad songs. Darling, all I know are sad songs, sad songs."
