Archipelago

by Cynewulf

Rating: teen
Tags: Sunset Shimmer, Slice of Life, Sad, Equestria Girls
Length: 2459

Sunset Shimmer is in quarantine.

After Sunset Shimmer's magic goes lethal against her will, she is placed in isolation. It isn't going well.

Written for Secret Moon's Isolation contest, found here: https://www.fimfiction.net/group/214867/secret-moons-self-isolation-writing-contest

Published 2020-05-08 00:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2020-05-08 00:00:01 UTC

Meditation 17, Month 3, Day 7

You begin to notice, after the first few days, that everything goes wrong. Not wrong as in failure, hopefully, not as in bolts snapping and bulkheads folding like wet paper. Wrong in a fundamentally more basic way than decompression and void.

It all goes absurd after the first few days, you see. One day you’ll wake up as normal, and and sluggishly go about your routines as normal. A shower. Brushing your hair and teeth, putting on clothes, perhaps, or not--who knows, it doesn’t matter. It especially doesn’t matter because you will sit at a table or on a couch or somewhere, and realize that you are hungry. You’ll be out of whatever it was you usually eat. You’ll swear there’s another box, and you’re right but won’t find it for another few days, and you’ll go back to wherever you were with some bizarre breakfast choice. And you’ll sit there, eating, your mind utterly blank, and then it hits you that everything is patently absurd.

Nothing makes sense and it probably never did. Why are houses shaped this way? Why are you? What is the point of sitting on this couch, eating an entire can of crispy potato products?

And, were you me, you would say to yourself, Twilight, why are you doing any of this? Why are you inside? What are you hiding from? But you know what you are hiding from. But why hide from it? Why really?

I think the absurdity starts to settle in for the long haul after that first moment. The absolute stupifying meaninglessness of choosing what food to eat in what order, the numb, long moments where you lean against a door frame. It’s all just sort of… boring. You can’t even get worked up about how inane it is.

Like Fremen in the desert, you move without rhythm. Your slouching steps, your shortcuts. The impression in the couch.

I moved everything after a week. Not everything everything, just the things that fill enough space that you can thoughtlessly say you moved everything out loud to no one and then dwell on it off and on for a week. Or three.

Your life in isolation changes shape. Life above ground is more of a kind of… like a line, I guess? A progression through time, physical progression but also a kind of narrative progression. Your day is you moving through the world and through a story of how you lived. But without a wide world to progress in, without that space, progression curves in on itself and becomes a series of islands. Every day is an archipelago of moments disconnected each from the next with only the setting the same.

Days stop being about what you’re planning and where you’re going and more about the numb utilitarian action sailing the archipelago until you reach the island where your friends call.

“Hey, Sunset,” they’ll say.

You say hello back. No need to be rude. And you’re filled with energy about this and you’re happy, you think, so sure.

“How’s it going? We’re sending stuff down the chute tomorrow. Got any requests?” Dash will say. She always asks. She’s convinced that all I need is good snacks and the rest of life is made.

“I have some books you might like,” Twilight will say quietly but with the energy you’ve come to know indicates her own nervous excitement. She misses you as much as you miss her. “I sent you PDFs! They’re in your email. I hope you like them.”

You did like them. You’ve read one already all the way, but hadn’t replied. Replying is a little weird. You thought about keeping notes. You almost did. A you that used to exist would have taken a few notes in the margins.

“I asked the Archmage pony if you could have a friend. He isn’t sure yet,” Fluttershy will say, her sad face tugging at your heart strings for a moment. “But he is looking into it! He promised.”

“Hey, stay strong down there. When you get out, we’ll do something big. Remember how you an’ me talked about goin’ west? We’ll do that. Go see some painted dunes and canyons and what not.” Applejack is slightly off-center in the picture.

One of your favorite places in Equestria was the Griffonian Divide. You went there with Celestia once, the one time she brought you with her on a trip abroad. You were still a filly then, but you remember it well. You told Applejack about it a month before you sealed yourself in this tomb.

They never stay for long. They can’t, they won’t, whichever, it ends in ten minutes at most and then the world is so quiet. Except, no it isn’t. You learned already to avoid the quiet forever. Somewhere there is always music inarticulate and looping, somewhere there is the fan turning, somewhere always noise. You can never be bathed in silence for even a heartbeat.

But it does suck the air out of you a bit.

There’s no amount of lofi beats to chill/study/fuck your brains out to that will fill this void. You suspect that that channel might actually be making it easier to just wallow in the feeling of emptiness, but it’s your favorite and what else are you going to fill the void with?

In the continuing litany of things that your quarantine imposes, the knowledge of others’ ability to live without you with ease is definitely up there as probably the most unsettling.

You didn’t feel any different. You didn’t feel sick. The world was normal and the sun was bright and the acid reflux only hit when you ate something spicy and everything in your life was normal. Three, four months ago. You’d check the date but, why? Who cares? One day you were fine and the next you weren’t. Or really, you never changed, it was everyone in relation to you that changed. One minute you’re Sunset Shimmer, recent high school graduate out on the job hunt in a world not your own, and the next you’re Sunset Shimmer, quarantined in your apartment after a random human almost dies in front of you, just a touch being enough to suck him all-but-dry of his precious life force. Death has red hair and shakes your hand when you greet her, and that’s you, you’re death.

They got in touch with Twilight beyond the portal and the rest was just a blur of preparations and long days where you did nothing in a stupor, trying not to make this situation any worse.

Everyone seemed really optimistic at first. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks, they said, like it was a vacation. See you in a month. But then you couldn’t come out. Leaving was too dangerous.

The world could have stopped up there. You wouldn’t know. They buried you deep.

But you doubt it. You sinerely doubt it. In all likelihood, nothing really changed. The gap you left fills back up with air. Your friends didn’t forget about you, but they didn’t need to. Their lives developed. Their interiority developed with no account of you. A Twilight there exists who does not come knocking when she wants help with a new project.

You know what was painful but also made you just start laughing after the first month? They probably had a groupchat without you, where they could talk way from you without the pressure of keeping your spirits up or your lingering grayed out name. You knew Pinkie probably named it something idiotic like No Bacon Bits. She probably kept changing it like she changed the old group chat. And then it became not the Other One but the Main One, and your Main One is everyone’s Other One. The locus slips, it sidles along. You are unstuck in Time and you fear you may never find your way back in. Your fear is valid. It’s probably correct. Who would know?

Both Twilights are up there, working. So you are told. They got the Equestrian Academy to send them some of the principality’s brightest minds to study how your aura had turned so lethal so quickly, and by what mechanism it harmed. At first you had fed on their infrequent reports ravenously, reading them over and over, curled in a ball on your new little bed. You do not remember when the last one was sent but you didn’t read it.

Sunset, you’ll say to yourself quietly as you gaze in the mirror, this is going to End. You are going to go back up into the sunlight soon. You’re going to do stupid experiments with Twilight again. You are going to get a cat when this is over. You are going to pick up the first beautiful human you see and fuck until you get muscle cramps from the dehydration. You’re going roadtripping with Applejack.You are going to the bar on Fortification Street, the Irish one you’ve been meaning to go to, and you are going to have fun. You’re going to play so many video games with Dash and Pinkie that you get sick of games and also them and then you play some more and you go to sleep at 5 AM, stumbling into your bed that Pinkie has already claimed and wake up with somehow no covers and also with your face full of frizzy pink curls.

You poke at the mirror and you think all of that loudly and then the world just kinda doesn’t care, and you finish brushing your teeth and you’d already forgotten half of it.

Maybe it’s true! Or maybe you’ll kind of just wind down. Your mind just gets dimmer and weirder until you go to sleep and then only your body wakes up on auto pilot forever.

You spent a lot of time thinking about what that would be like, until you twisted your brain into knots thinking about it.

But they’ll come for you eventually. They will. Probably.

The basement compound you’ve been living in won’t be a tomb. One day you’ll climb the stairs and you’ll walk outside and squint your eyes in the sun. You’ll smell the grass and have allergies about it and no woman will be an island and all will be part of the continent. You’ll rejoin the fold, be a part of the main, and there will be no more seperation. When you rise up there will be wall between you and life.

You think about something you read once, it went--

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were--

And you can’t decide if it’s true in the way that natural laws and magical precepts are true but you hope it is. You hope that one’s death might be to another as important as the loss of a friend, and that even you could not help but be involved in Mankind, despite where you were born. But you don’t know that. You don’t know that and you can’t know that. But you hope for this thing you’ve never seen, because until you were laying on your back in the middle of the living room staring at the stucco on the ceiling it never occurred to you to question how connected to others you were because why would it ever occur to you? You were a fish swimming and you had no time to ask about the water you were swimming in. You had no time to claw at bits you’ve read trying to make sense of being alone.

You’ve wasted the day. Your stomach rebels against you, and you go looking through your supplies to fill it. You eat, you lounge, you sleep in the promise of something that is not fitful dreaming, and that mostly seems to mean chicken noodle soup in front of a computer.

Rebirth is not as grand or as quick as you would like it. But you are involved in mankind, even if mankind is just you, and some campbell’s soup, and the flickering monitor light.

You raise your bowl. “Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that,” you say to yourself, the only person to talk to, gregarious, and eat. The bell won’t toll for you today.

If you can live through this, you’ll live through anything. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, or whatever. It’s a lie, but damn is it a good lie. A useful lie.

Author's Note

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath afflicion enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security."

John Donne, Meditation 17