Music Therapy

Last night's storm came and went.

Honestly, you never understood the necessity for storms in this world when a prevailing race controls the weather. A lot of this world is beyond your comprehension. You never really fit in here.

All your life, you wanted nothing more than to come here. It was only when you arrived that you realized how misguided that desire was. There is no place in Equestria for a human. You were deluded in thinking you'd get a doting wife, a circle of friends, a sense of self-affirmation. Because you could go to the purest world across all of existence, and that still wouldn't change who you are.

You're broken. Your demons will follow you wherever you go. Crippling your every attempt at forming healthy relationships with others.

If there is no hope, then what's the point? Why live like this? You're not happy. You never will be happy. You just want it to be over.

A knock on your door interrupts your thoughts. You open the door for Eri. No socks today. No accessories at all, save for a fresh bandage. And your rubber band.

She notices you looking and comments. "It's gotten better out there. Stopped snowing and wind's died down."

The two of you take your seats across from one another.

"How was the trip here?" you ask.

"You ever notice how the snow blanketing everything makes the world feel quieter? It was almost eerie."

"Yeah, the walk back to my office last night was kind of gloomy, too." You instinctively fidget with your wrist before remembering where your rubber band went.

"You okay, Anon?"

"Yeah. Just didn't sleep well."

"The storm keep you up?"

"Bad dreams."

"You want to talk about it?"

You sigh. "I don't know what to say. I've had these recurring nightmares since the night I tried to kill myself. Dreams where I actually go through with it, feel myself slowly dying, piece by piece, and wake up in a sweat. Every time it goes down the same way, and every time I genuinely believe it's happening for real. No matter how many times I go through it, I know I'm doomed to suffer it again. Like an eternal curse. Destined to forget the torment and relive it anew each time, like Sisyphus or Prometheus."

"Who?" she asks.

"It doesn't matter," you mumble.

Her ears fold back as she watches you sympathetically. "Anon, I never told you what happened. The night I tried to die."

"No, Eri, you don't have to—"

"I want to." She pauses. "Can you just— come over here?" she asks, beginning to tear up. "I don't think I can say it very loudly."

You oblige, taking the spot next to her on the couch.

She leans her head on your shoulder. "It was almost two weeks ago. I was miserable, suffering, I wanted it to be over. I cut out the dark thoughts. I thought it would be better if I pretended they didn't exist. And it worked. I felt better. I was alone in my head, I could think clearly. It was like this fog was finally lifted. I took one look at my apartment, and I wanted to do better. I finally had some tiny ounce of motivation to act. So I cleaned my place up, organized my things, climbed into my bathtub, and slit my hooves."

"What? Wh— How?"

She sniffles. "I wasn't better. Not really. I saw how much I fucking hated living and how much I wanted it to be over. Once the haze was gone I realized that only I could finally end it. So I took what little motivation I had, and put it towards dying."

You look down at her, a quivering wreck, her cheeks wet with tears.

"I cut deeper than I'd ever gone before. Must have hit an artery or something because the pain took me out quick. The darkness slipped over me, and for the first time, I could see it for what it really was."

"What?"

"Nothing. It's nothing. There's nothing behind the veil. It's just an empty void in your head. You want to believe it's some separate entity, that it's not a part of you, but that's not true. It is you as much as you are it. You can repress it, ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist, but sooner or later it's going to come out again. And when I passed out, it came out in full force. The darkness enveloped me. It was the cold, the pain. Numb and agonizing all at once. I screamed, but it made no sound. I cried, but there were no tears. I had become the nothing, had lost all sensation. I realized I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do."

"What happened?"

"I saw Princess Luna. I couldn't see anything. Not the darkness, not myself. But I saw her. And the look on her face scared me more than the nothing ever could. For some sick reason, my mind had dragged her into it. It was one thing to do this to myself. But to force it upon her... the last thing I remembered was complete shame. Not the pain, not the anguish. The shame."

She rests her head on your lap, too emotionally exhausted to prop herself up. "I woke up in the hospital. Found out that it was Princess Luna who had saved me after all. I'm alive because of what I did to her. That shame, it hasn't left. She didn't want this, she didn't consent to any of it. But I made her stand face-to-face my darkness anyway. I actually scarred the mare who suffered for a thousand years. And that just feels like... shit."

You stroke her mane reassuringly. She shuts her eyes and submits to your movements, finding comfort in them.

"When Luna brought me in, she didn't seem scarred," you say. "She looked concerned. The only thing on her mind was your well-being."

"I know you mean well, Anon," she sighs, "but you didn't see her in my dream. I horrified her, changed her, showed her something she couldn't wrap her head around. I exposed her to that darkness for the first time."

"No, you didn't. I did."

She looks up at you.

"My first night here, a year ago, I was a guest in the castle. Luna visited my dream. She saw the nightmare. Saw me kill myself."

A look of disbelief casts over her face. "Are you serious?"

"She comforted me. Of course she didn't understand, but she had nothing but sympathy. That's why she asked me to talk to you. I was the only other creature she knew who shared that same impulse. The want to die."

"I can't believe it," she whispers.

"She wasn't shocked by the darkness, Eri. She was shocked that it could exist within a pony. You didn't traumatize her. You don't deserve to bear that guilt. Your pain is not a burden on anyone, you don't have to close yourself off for fear of hurting them."

Holy shit.

You genuinely believe that holds true for Eri.

So why is it so difficult to accept it as true for yourself?

"Do you really mean that?" she asks.

"Of course I do. I don't want you to feel like you have to isolate yourself from anyone. You deserve the comfort of opening up to someone as much as any other pony, no matter what's in your head. Nothing you say could make me stop caring about you."

She pauses, nervously fiddling with her bandages in your lap. Almost as if she's building up the courage...

"Anon?"

"Yeah?"

"I— I love you."

Inside your head, there are three pillars of identity. The ideal self, which encompasses all the traits you aspire to have, an impractically perfect model. The perceived self, which is part how you see yourself, and part how others see you. The real self, the objective truth, which, while possibly overlapping the perceived or ideal self in some aspects, is ultimately unknowable in its entirety.

The reason I mention this, is because up until this moment, each of your selves was vastly different from one another. Who you really were was nothing like how you saw yourself, or who you wanted to be. In this very moment, every conception of your own self was shattered. You had been denying the feelings of your real self. You labored under a cynical delusion of the perceived self. You desperately sought after an unreachable ideal self, unable to accept it was incompatible with what you really wanted— who you really wanted.

And Eri's sense of self, which you had some small glimpse into, but, being unable to see her thoughts, lacking in any real insight, was a whole other beast. Now faced with a crossroads, forced to accept your feelings for what they are, and reconcile them with the feelings of a mare you cared so deeply about... It was daunting, to say the least.

Having spaced out for the past 37 seconds, lost among arduous thoughts and mental gymnastics, you finally realize what Eri is saying to you.

"—so sorry, Anon, please just forget I said anything, I feel like a complete idiot..."

You look down at her. "I'm sorry."

"No, I'm—"

"I know the past ten days have been a complete wreck. But in that wreck, we started to find each other. Piece by piece, we put together the puzzles of ourselves. There were even a few pieces that got mixed up between us. In me, there is some of you, and some of me in you. There's so much that we figured out right here on this couch. So many introspective nights. It took us a while to figure out, but we learned that we share the same darkness. And it's exactly because of that darkness... that I can't do this."

"W-What?" she asks, her voice breaking.

"I know you think you love me. I know you must have very deep feelings for me..."

"No, no, no..." she whispers in horror, crawling back away from your lap, on the verge of tears.

"Eri, please, listen. I have these same feelings. I think about you constantly. But we can't keep doing this. As ridiculous as it feels, I'm supposed to be your therapist. Someone you trust, and confide in. You don't love me. I'm just the first person to come along who's understood you, and that's— that's not the same thing."

"No!" she yells, cowering on the other side of the couch. "You c-can't say that, after everything..."

"This isn't healthy. It's only been ten days, you don't know what you want. We're headed down a path that is just going to hurt us. I can't be your savior, I can't fix you, you're not some manic pixie dream girl for me to rescue. I'm just a fucked-up guy who has his own demons. I'm not going to risk your health by dragging you into a mess you're not ready for."

"That's not fair," she cries. "You don't get to fucking decide what I want. You made me let you in, and the second it gets real, you want to pull away, like all that meant nothing."

You stand up, exasperated, throwing your arms in the air. "I don't know! What do you want me to say? I don't like what I did either, I pushed and pushed and pushed until I made you open up to me and I fucking hate it! I'm not a shrink, I have no clue what I'm doing with you. I don't deserve your trust, I poked and prodded because I thought I knew what's best for you, and obviously I don't. Your life is literally at stake here, and I'm not going to let what I want do anything to jeopardize that!"

"What WE want!" she yells. "I've spent such a long time afraid of what could happen, so many nights staying up terrified at the idea of letting myself love you. But every single time you've proved that nothing is going to stop you from loving me back. I know you want this, damn it!"

You pace around the room angrily. "Of course I want it! I never fucking thought I'd love again, and here you come, dropped into my lap by the Princess of the night, to upend my whole life! We're too fucking broken to do this back and forth! To pretend that we can have some normal perfect life, when all we're really going to get is double the darkness! We're just stumbling around blindly, we don't know how to help each other!"

"And what about this?" she shouts at you, tearing her bandages off, exposing her scars. "Two nights ago, I did this to myself because I didn't want to love you! I abandoned you, cut you out of my life, and mutilated myself to escape these feelings. And what did you do? You fought for me! You didn't let me pull away. You came to me and washed the blood away, patched me up and told me you'd be there when I needed you. And now I'm finally ready to admit I need you, and you want to pull away just like I did. I'm not going to let you do that, now that I know you love me, I'm going to fight for you the way you fought for me!"

You break down into tears. "I'm not good enough for you, Eri! You need stability, you need something you can hang onto, and I can't be that! I barely know how to stay alive!"

"YOU'RE not good enough for ME?" she scoffs, her words choked by her desperate cries. "What do you think was running through my head when I was cutting myself open? Those dark thoughts, jeering and ridiculing me, saying I'll never be half as good as that mare you loved! Fuck, if I can't be her, how am I supposed to be enough for you?"

You stop pacing.

"Don't you say that," you whisper, your voice quivering. "You are NOTHING like her. I stopped loving her because I knew she would never know me. I gave up on love because I knew a mare could never know me. But you know me more than any living creature ever has."

"Then why are you so afraid?" she sobs.

"Because it's SO. FUCKING. HARD to know me! Every day that I have to wake up and live my life as me is exhausting! I'm so numb, so tired! I just want to fucking curl up and die, but I know I can't, because I'm trapped in a magical paradise where no one's allowed to kill themselves! The only reason I didn't blow my brains out before I ever met you is because then, I would've had to leave a certain princess, the only mare who'd ever shown me an ounce of compassion, with the lifelong guilt that maybe, just maybe, she could have done something to prevent it."

Your legs give out from under you, and you fall to your knees. "But you want to know the truth? If I killed myself, there wouldn't be a fucking thing she could have done to stop it. That's the worst part. I have to live like this, because otherwise... she'd just blame herself."

Eri climbs down from the couch to you and throws her hooves around your neck. Her mane presses into your face, burying you in her scent. In all your time here, you've never gotten to smell a pony before. It wasn't even something you'd considered. But hers is just so... sweet. There's no other way to describe it.

Your cries die down as she holds you reassuringly. She pulls back only once you're suitably assuaged.

You wipe your eyes. "This isn't going to work. If we did this, and it didn't work out... I don't want to lose you. I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to end up breaking your heart. I don't want you to regret loving me. You've gone through so much suffering already. I'd rather die than cause you any more pain."

Silently, she looks into your eyes.

Eight nights ago, you fell in love with those eyes.

Six nights ago with her words.

Four nights ago with her humor.

Two nights ago with her mind.

Tonight, you're just in love with her. There's no more denying it. You love her.

But you can't do this.

She doesn't say anything. There's nothing left to be said.

So she kisses you.

You submit to it immediately, pushing back into her lips with all the want in your heart.

Behind this kiss is the intense passion of every night you've spent with her, every laugh you've shared, every cry you've endured. It is everything you've ever wanted, everything you thought you'd never get.

Slowly, she pulls back, still close enough to feel her breath on your face, her forehead leaning against yours. She looks you in the eyes, one last time, with tears streaming...

And runs out of your office. Heartbroken.

There you sit, brought to your knees, on the floor of your office...

And you are all alone.

The storm of your relationship has passed, leaving nothing but a trail of destruction in its wake.

Everything you ever held dear, reduced to dust.

This is it.

The end of the line.

She left hours ago.

The tenth night, the final night, draws to an end.

While you pull out your blanket and lie down on the couch, a million thoughts race through your mind.

Did you do the right thing, Anon?

You love her with all your heart. You had to protect her from yourself.

You hate that you want her. All you want is to make her happy.

But you can't make her happy.

If you can't make yourself happy, then what good can you do for her?

If your relationship failed, and you couldn't even be friends... what kind of life would that be? Without her?

There's no going back. You need her in your life. You need someone who knows you.

To risk everything you've built? To gamble with both your lives, just because you have this stupid craving for affection?

You don't want to risk it.

But then, what is love, if not that risk? For a shot at happiness?

How can you ever expect to find that happiness if you never take a leap of faith?

How can you embrace the safety of love if you're too afraid to face its trials?

To reach that place of light...

You have to cross the darkness.

You wrap yourself in the blanket, doubting every choice you've ever made.

Just as you think you might have made a huge mistake,

You hear your door open.

There stands Eri

Bathed in the dim light of the hall

She gazes at you

And says just one thing

"I'm not afraid of the pain, Anon."

Tonight is the first night in Equestria you ever felt safe. Tonight you finally allowed yourself to feel. You've been denying yourself for so long. You've been afraid to let yourself love again. You thought it was over for you. That it was too late. Like you didn't deserve happiness. That you were too broken to be loved.

We're all just floating through life, trying to find our purpose. It's hard. For some people more than others.

There is a darkness inside of you. A part of you. Eri was right. It's not a monster, or some evil force. It's just you. So it's never going to go away.

Love isn't some magical cure. Even in a world of magic. The truth is, no one can fix you.

But no one can face it alone.

Even though you thought it'd never happen... you found someone who understands you.

Because even in a world where there's no one quite like you,

There's always going to be someone like you.

You don't have to go through it alone.

Now, as you lie on the couch in your office,

Drifting off to sleep,

With the mare you love in your arms,

Absentmindedly playing with the rubber band on her hoof,

Her head peacefully resting against your still-beating heart,

You can finally accept the one thing you've always doubted.

It's not always going to be easy, Anon,

But it's going to be okay.

...

I promise it's going to be okay.