I wish I didn’t have to wake up.
I wish I didn’t have to wake up and end my dream. I wish I could sleep forever so I could live in my dream.
So I could live…in Equestria.
I have a problem with that actually. I told my therapist two weeks ago that I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up again. Those exact words. I remember I saw her furiously scribbling on her notepad. And then she sighed deeply and grilled me with a bunch of questions. “How long have you had thoughts of suicide?” “Have you attempted suicide before?” And when I denied it, she said that suicidal thoughts were common among boys my age (boys my age!?), and that I shouldn’t be ashamed to be open about my feelings. “I’m only here to help you,” she said.
She looked deep into my eyes, and I looked straight back at her. I was…examining her.
She didn’t look…concerned, mind you. More like…frustration. Her papers are strewn chaotically across her desk—some of them crinkled and smudged with age. There’s a picture of her daughter from “a long time ago”—so she says—and she’s wearing, interestingly enough, a My Little Pony t-shirt. The girl wearing it doesn’t seem very happy. She’s barely showing her teeth when she’s smiling. It’s probably a hand-me-down t-shirt from her cousin that she was forced to wear. She probably hates that shirt. I’d wear it if it fit me. I love that picture of the shirt more than she does the shirt itself.
My therapist also has a pot of daffodils on her desk. At least a dozen of them, in full bloom. She’s hasn’t watered them. She needs to remember to water them, or they’ll wilt and die. Just like any plant. I hate that she doesn’t take care of her daffodils, but I like the daffodils themselves. In fact, that’s the only part of her office that I like.
Princess Twilight Sparkle loves daffodils. She puts it in her favorite sandwich—the daffodil and daisy and sandwich. She also spreads some mayonnaise in between the bread for better flavor. She never said that in the show, but she told me. In my dream. Twilight and I are good friends.
People think I’m so unperceptive. Not in the least. My friends in my dreams taught me how to perceive emotions. It’s an important part of friendships: making friends, and making them last. You can see in their face, their body language. And human facial expressions aren’t really that different from ponies.
“I wish I could sleep longer,” I clarified for my therapist. “Not forever. Just for a long time. Like…almost forever, I guess,”
She thought I wanted to kill myself. This isn’t the first time that’s happened—one time I told her that I wanted to “fly like a bird, into the heavens.” A poor choice of words, now that I look back. She thought I meant “fly” metaphorically—I mean it literally.
She didn’t believe me. I remember she told me, “You know you are a human, right. You know that you can’t fly, Tyler?”
I can fly. I do fly. In Equestria. The place where I can fly. Every night when I close my eyes, I’m taken to that place. I shudder a little. I open my eyelids, and the bright sunshine pours through. I flap my pegasus wings. And I fly. Into the heavens.
I think she still believes I want to kill myself, because when I show up at the office every week, she looks at me and says with a dubious look in her eye, “So. You’re here today.” I don’t want to kill myself. No way. I just like sleeping. I like the dreams of Equestria that I have when I’m asleep. And I know if I kill myself and I die, that’s different than just sleeping forever. It’s not like I’ll be sleeping forever and living in Equestria forever and ever.
Isn’t it?
Is it?
I showed up late to school today. It used to be if I was going to be late, Mom would wake up me and drag me out of bed. Now I’m in high school, I have my own car and I drive myself in the mornings. And Mom goes to work by herself.
Mom got me the car so I could drive to my part time job cleaning up at the biotech business park downtown. She kept harping on about how I need early work experience so that I’ll even stand a chance in the job market.
The job didn’t work out. In other words, I quit. It was so lame. Mom must’ve yelled at me for a whole week. “Are you trying to throw away your future, Tyler!? Ugh, how am I going to explain this to your dad…?”
Mom doesn’t understand that if I know someone famous—like royalty, for example—then it’ll all work out, whether I have internship experience or not. It just will. And I do know royalty. I know a pony princess. “You’re crazy,” that’s Mom’s response to me. It’s the reason why I see a therapist.
Something about it that makes me remember one particular Sunday afternoon, when I was sitting at a small table in Starbucks with Mom. It was really loud and noisy from people laughing and chatting about something that sounded fun, and Mom was sitting across from me at the table saying, “Hey, Tyler? Hello? Look at me. Look at me. Listen. This is serious. This is serious.”
I used to have giant stickers of the Mane 6 that I stuck on the back bumper of my car. The Twilight Sparkle sticker is the biggest, since I have a…special connection to her, after all. I put the six of them next to each other, because of how they’re best of friends and that they’ll always stick together (Hehe, get it, “stick”? Bad pun? Ok fine). They’re not actual bumper stickers, so they got worn out from the rain and covered in dust and soot.
They were really hard to peel off. Mom gave me a sponge with soapy water and that worked.
When I got to class today, I told my teacher that I was late because I was busy in my dream. Everyone laughed. I almost chuckled myself—I loved that I could make others laugh like that. I sat down at my desk. “Nice ‘excuse,’ man,” Nick said, mocking me.
“Wait, Nick,” I said as I took my seat next to him. “But don’t you ever have…really involved dreams, I guess? Like, a dream that feels so real?”
“Well, you know,” he said, leaning close to me to whisper, “I had this weird-ass dream the other night where I was banging Meredith. And the result was pretty damn real…it showed up in my pants the next morning. Heh. If you catch my drift. Hey, by the way, you know if she’s still seeing that douchebag Carter?”
Nick sits at the desk next to mine. He’s just like all the others. They don’t understand it. Or more like, I don’t understand everyone else. It seems that everyone else just…falls asleep at night. And then it’s nothing, darkness, pitch black. Which in my opinion, would suck. Or, they do “weird-ass” things in their dreams like “banging Meredith.” (Which is not that weird, because rumor has it she’s slept with half the boys in our grade this year alone.)
My dreams are nothing like that. My dreams are…serious. I have to work when I’m asleep. Inside my dreams. I have a night job. Or you could say, a dream job. Heh.
It kind of is.
I work in Equestria. A land inhabited by beautiful, pastel-colored creatures—changelings, griffons, yaks, hippogriffs, and of course…ponies. Strong earth ponies, flighty pegasi, and magical unicorns. You’ve all heard of Equestria before, so I won’t give you the whole long-winded explanation that I tell my parents or my younger brother when they hear me talk in my sleep.
You can call me Cirrus Wisp. I’m a cream-colored pegasus filly, born and raised in Ponyville. I’m incredibly precocious when it comes to book study. Math, science, Ponish, they all come easily to me. I’ve already completed Ponyville School, passing with flying colors. Miss Cheerilee decided it’d be best for me to become a personal student to Princess Twilight Sparkle. Not only does she challenge my intellect—she teaches me about the virtues of friendship. Which can’t really be taught from a book.
Dad and I had another argument at the dinner table. Mom just had to bring up that I quit my job. Again. And how I’m not going to have enough money to be financially stable in these hard times. We always argue about heavy things like that.
I left my plate unfinished and I went to my room without brushing my teeth. I slammed the door for dramatic effect. I went straight to bed. Because then I have more time to escape. To Equestria.
Twilight comes every night to personally fetch me. After I climb into bed, cover myself with the blanket, turn the light out, and close my eyes.
I take a 10 second deep breath. The slowest deep breath that I breathe all day.
And then I open my eyes.
At first it is dark—like my bedroom normally is. Then, a pinprick of light appears, of a familiar purple color. Twilight picks a different place to appear every time. Sometimes the light appears at the window, or in a crack in my closet door. Last night, the light appeared on the top of my bed post. It grows. From a tiny dot into a blinding orb of light. I have to squint my eyes.
And then she flies out the orb of light. She lands on the foot of my bed. She folds her wings.
“Hey, Cirrus,” Twilight Sparkle greets me.
I smile. “Hey,” I tell her. My voice morphs into the voice of young filly. I stop speaking English and slowly transition into Ponish. It sounds nothing like English—there’s no rhyme or reason to it. The best way to describe it is sort of a…technical-glitchy warbling noise. Not even gibberish. Just…noise. Noise that I couldn’t even try to replicate after I wake up.
In my dream…it all makes perfect sense to me. The warbling noises just…click in my head as words.
“Are you ready?” Twilight asks.
By this time, I’ve completed my transformation. My two arms and two legs turn into four legs. My eyes grow larger and my muzzle grows out. I shrink to about a third of my height. Cream colored fur sprouts all over my body. Feathered wings appear on my back.
That’s when I’m ready. I’m ready to fly.
“Yes, I’m ready,” I say. “Let’s go!”
And we fly out of the darkness of my bedroom, and into the light of…Equestria. That’s the last time I see the darkness for the rest of the night. When I wake up the next morning, it is light already.
Last night, I helped Twilight prepare daffodil and daisy sandwiches for her royal meet and greet brunch. It’s her favorite food, and it was so noble of her to share it with her guests. I sat in the castle kitchen together with Twilight and Spike. I spread the mayonnaise on the bread, Twilight added the daffodils and daisies, and Spike put them together with little daffodil-tipped toothpicks.
“The mayonnaise really sets off the crispness of the daffodils,” Twilight noted.
“But they only taste good together,” Spike noted. “Just mayonnaise would be too heavy. Just daffodils and daisies would be too harsh on the palate.”
“Oh,” I said. There must have been at least 100 of the sandwiches, sitting on the party platter. I used my wings to hover over the platter. They sure looked tasty.
“What’s the matter?” Twilight asked me.
“Well…it’s just…we’ve been doing this for a while. And I’m really hungry.”
“Well, try one,” she said to me. “You’ve never had one before, have you?”
I have had one before. You know I tried making a daffodil and daisy sandwich myself, as a human. One afternoon after I drove home, I went to my neighbor’s flower bed to pick some flowers. She has a beautiful flower bed. I pass by it every time I drive home from school. Manicured lawn, lush azaleas, lined with tulips, daffodils, and white daisies. It’s almost as beautiful as the simplest garden in Ponyville. She’s a retired widow, maybe like 70 or something. She saw me through the front storm door. She yelled at me when I picked her daffodils and daisies: “Hey! You little son of a bitch! Come back here, damn it!”
I finally got around to making the sandwich after Mom yelled at me and threatened to institutionalize me. The sandwich I made tasted horrible. Like…bitter leaves. I spit out the flowers.
I was all alone at home, just sitting there. Biting into cold bread with nothing in it. We don’t keep mayonnaise at home. I was hungry, so I just ate the plain bread. Plain bread tastes like nothing, so it tasted like nothing, until I cried so much that the bread started tasting salty. I don’t know why I cried so much over that sandwich. I just really needed to cry.
I took a bite of the one of the sandwiches Twilight made. I was crying again. With a smile this time.
“Isn’t it good?” Twilight asked.
“Mmmmmm…” I said. “It’s delicious.” Here in Equestria, it’s all delicious. I ate four of the daffodil and daisy sandwiches.
Daffodils and daisies go great in a sandwich with a little bit of mayonnaise. I’ve never said that to any human. Not Mom, Dad, my brother, nor my therapist. They would never believe me. I could tell them that daffodil and daisy sandwiches are the best food in the whole wide world—the whole wide world being Equestria—but I could never take them there to prove it.
But I don’t care really. As long as I can enjoy it. I like that, actually. It’s like…that joy is there, just for me to experience. And me alone. It makes me special. Argh, what did Nick say about the word “special?” Right. Right, he said to me once, “Special is a word that lame people call themselves so that they feel better that they’re lame little fucks.”
“Nick? Who’s Nick?” Twilight asked.
I must have been thinking out loud. “Oh, erm…it’s nothing. It’s someone I know from my own world.”
“Does he not want to join you?”
I stop hovering in the air with my pegasus wings and sit on the chair. “Well…it’s not like Nick wants to come here. And he can’t. He can’t come to Equestria. No one else in my world can come to Equestria like I can.”
“You’re the only one?” Spike chimed in.
“Yeah. The creatures in my world look very different than here. Not like ponies at all. I myself look very different when I’m in my world.”
“What do they speak?” Twilight asked. She probes me with questions about this “alien world” that I live in. In exchange for lessons. It helps with her own personal research.
“Well, they talk something like this.” And I told them something. In English. I replicate the sounds exactly. “N-n-nicccce…excuuuusssse…mannnnn…” I say. It doesn’t flow easily off my pony tongue.
While I’m in Equestria, I don’t understand what English sounds mean. The sounds are the same, I know that, but they make no sense to me. It’s like…some otherworldly gibberish. It’s like if I were to speak Ponish while I’m awake. It would sound like…noise.
“Sounds really weird,” Spike said, chuckling.
“So you say other creatures from your world can’t come here?”
“Some can,” I said. “Rabbits, bears, squirrels, dogs, insects, they can all cross over. But I’m the only human. That’s the kind of creature I am in my world.”
“You must feel lonely here as the only human who can cross over.”
“I’m not lonely here, Twilight. I have you as my friends.” And we hugged. I wasn’t expecting the feeling of fur pressed against fur. It was…very soft. And warm. Not the least bit itchy.
I’ve always thought I’m more than just Twilight’s student. And I know she feels the same way too. We’re friends. Beautiful pony friends.
“I love you, Twilight,” I said in my filly voice.
“And I love you too, Cirrus,” Twilight said back.
I felt a warm sensation on my flank.
“Your cutie mark is glowing,” Twilight said. “Does that mean…”
It means it’s time for me to go. In the span of a few seconds, the images of Twilight and Spike’s smiling figures fade away. It turns into an orb of bright white light, surrounding me. A strange music begins to play in my ear.
The white light was sunlight coming through the curtains.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
The strange music was the sound of my alarm clock.
I turned off the alarm and headed downstairs to the kitchen. Mom was sitting in the kitchen, shuffling the stuff in her bag like she was packing. I wasn’t late for school this time.
I opened up my lunch box. I was still thinking about the huge party plate of daffodil and daisy sandwiches. So I was surprised when I saw my lunch box was completely empty. “Mom, where’s my lunch?” I asked.
Mom was quick to snap at me. Which is why I’m glad I drive myself now and I don’t have to see her as often. “What d’you mean where’s your lunch?” she yelled. “It’s your responsibility!”
“Since when!?”
“Don’t you give me that attitude, mister.”
“Attitude, my ass!” I screamed. “Whatever. I’ll just buy lunch. What is it today, cheesesteaks?”
Mom stopped shuffling the stuff in her bag. “Are you crazy, Tyler!? They always add mayonnaise, and you know you can’t egg products! Now hurry up, it’s already 7:49, you’re gonna be late like you were yesterday!”
“Well…what the hell do you want me to do!?”
“Make a fucking sandwich, I don’t know! Your lunch is your responsibility, Tyler!”
I yanked open the fridge door and grabbed a tub of tuna salad. I scooped some onto a slice of bread. I tore a few leaves of lettuce straight off the head and slapped it on top. And then another slice of bread.
My ears were still ringing from all the yelling when I finally got into my car.
The sandwich really wasn’t that bad actually. I ate it at lunch, and it was tasty enough that I actually enjoyed eating by myself.
I stuck a little daffodil-shaped toothpick in the sandwich before I packed it. It was really pretty.
Author's Note
Thanks for reading! 
This is my first attempt at a human MLP fic, so let me know what you think! Until next time! 
