Let It Grow

by themoontonite

Rating: everyone
Tags: Romance, Slice of Life, Main 6, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 2316

Take some time to rest and behold the splendor of love.

Love is many things. It is always unique, always sits different in the chest of the lover who bears it. It may burn or it may cool, it may excite the blood or soothe the nerve, but it is always love. Come, then. Won't you take some time to let it grow?

Written as an entry to the Quills And Sofas Pride contest, where it and Thank You placed second. Edited with the help of the esteemed, talented, hard-working, quick-witted, and ever delightful Red Parade. Art credit to and obtained from: Spectralunicorn for the FlutterDash piece, White Diamonds for the RariJack piece, and Wandering Pegasus for the TwiPie piece.

Published 2020-12-18 01:10:00 UTC
Last updated 2020-12-18 01:10:00 UTC

Summer Lovers, Lost Then Found

How can I tell you I love you? How, indeed, do I profess a feeling beyond my body when it’s all I am? When it’s all any of us are? Maybe with my joints, my ruffled feathers and failing breath as we wind down to a meadow handpicked by you, goddess of my spring and fountain of my life; I will love you as best I can.

As we come to rest there is a picnic, set to replace the one we lost a moon ago. That’s your excuse, at least, but the way your face disappears behind your mane tells me otherwise. My heart speaks and tells me it’s not a bid to redo but a test of your inner love. If I could walk around inside that vault, to lay a hoof on its firm walls, to be complete in the depth of affection of another mare? The day wraps around my mind and you wrap yourself around me and I unwind. I spiral, a dizzied flier into your waiting hooves, and you catch and meet me there, in the place where the world softens and slows. You smile, and I see a home for me in your heart.

The time it's taken, the decades gap left in our love by crushing uncertainty stings like the morning sun in too-tired eyes. I find it hard to grasp sometimes, like trying to hold ozone between my hooves, but with you it eases. The soft sunsong of your coat, the gentle purr of your voice against me as you lean into my collarbone, your hoof braced against the checkered blanket; all of it swims into focus.

The time was worth it. The time was a test of loyalty, a test of kindness, a test of the bond between lovers forged in summer skies. One could consider it a testament. It’s a trophy, something I can point to and exalt. Look! See, then, how I loved her through it all? See how it was made easy not by my own merit but by the merit of the unyielding sunshine of her soul? See now how it and she wraps around me, compressing those years into a single dense moment, a singular kiss as the birds sing our praises? Her praises.

I’d sing them too, if I could.

I have never believed in kindness. Not in the way others believe. It moves through me, like I'm an avatar of the softer side of the world. There is no need to believe in what is inside you already. I simply am and kindness is, and we move through each other like long, thin wings through summer air; thick with the humidity of unspent rain. I save my belief for the multitude of things that are outside me, that I cannot hold the way I hold you; cradled close to my warm chest when the sun has done its time and slips away to make room for the moon.

We breathe in tandem and I feel the wind of life slip from me to you, then around again; a beautiful cycle guided by fate and made real through flesh and blood. Your sleepy murmurs and shuddering tremors of dreamed movement are percussion in the song your body plays for me as I nestle against you. The hum of your blood, the gentle thrum of your heart, it all plays in a time signature only you and I are privy to.

For a long time, I was lost. I thought I had lost you too, in the haze of a too-low voice and a too-short name. In that empty space, that meaningless time, nothing seemed to fit right. Nothing but the names you gave me. There was a sturdiness evidenced in your friendship even then. There was something within me yet unknown but you must’ve seen it. There is no way you didn’t feel the me waiting to be born as you shielded the me that still lived from the world around her. You were the first pony to see me for who I was.

I’ve told you as much and you just laugh. You say I’m silly, that you were just doing what was right, but I know from the way the corner of your eyes tug that you are moved. It’s hard not to be honest around you, to stop myself from baring the tangled thorns of my heart. You’ve never once flinched from the parts of me I feel are too ugly or too heavy to bear. When we are alone we speak a secret language, of quiet glances and fluttering feathers that stir the honey of our thoughts.

I love our secrets, our special places and thoughts and feelings that only we high fliers have access to. I love your quiet moments - like patient storms - just as much as I love your thunder and lightning, your boisterous blue against blue. The sky is jealous of your hue, rainbows envy the colors you paint across the sky with your movement, and I feel neither jealousy nor envy as you alight in front of me with sweat streaking your brow and a smile writ large across your face.

I only feel peace and kindness and something that is both inside and outside me: love.

Two Sides, Same Coin

How, then, did you see me? Through the forest, in the depths of the orchard where I was couched, waiting for love to pass over me like a summer rain; how did you find your way to my heart? And why, then, did you tend to it as you did? Do you know what you’ve done to me? The lover you’ve made with your words, the painful nights yearning for the sweet honey apple of your touch?

But. But! I digress. I divert, indeed, all my focus now to you, lying cupped in the dappled shade of an apple tree. I slump ragged against a red delicious and you spring from your chair, towel and water clasped in your magic. I don’t have time to move, to defend myself from the immovable force of your love. I barely have time to thank you before it catches me again and I’m humbled by your beauty.

You humble me further still by stealing my line, pushing my hat up as you whisper out an affirmation of your affection. The wind steals it but not before I can hold it in my heart, another mark upon that sturdy drum that beats out a tempo for the earth. Now, in this moment, it beats only for you as our bodies hang delicate in the balance of a universe made just for us. I swear your lips are upon me before we touch, the taste of rose preceding the soft embrace that I lean into. It makes the work worth it.

Indeed, it makes every foolish moment leading up to this worth it. Every word out of place, every petty disagreement, every clash of personality was worth suffering through if it meant one kiss from you. One love so pure, so foundational to the world that it may as well be the earth I walk upon. Your love is a scaffold and I the barnraiser. I couldn’t be without you but with you being is easy. The lightness you move with is lent and I borrow freely, carrying myself prouder still because of such a love.

I’ll carry us both if it comes to it.

I did not know the earth when I was born. I suppose we were all shaped from it in one way or the other, but my connection to it has always been tenuous at best. I am thought and magic and light, you are dirt and sun and sweat and this makes you unknowable to me. That which is unknowable is the most easily coveted, a prize to capture or a puzzle to solve. So imagine my surprise when I seek to know you and you open, yielding all and hiding naught from the light of my heart.

It was disarming! What was I meant to do? I came prepared for a battle, to tangle myself in the strings of your soul and struggle against the insurmountable strength of your spirit. To say you yielded would imply a need to give ground. I stood on the step of your door and you welcomed me inward, ushering me towards the warmth of your hearth.

Still, our natures are opposed and it is in this opposition I found the struggle I had been seeking. It is a comfort in a way; a consistency in a life increasingly devoid of such. I could count on you to have a mind whose thoughts and feelings sat across mine and I could count on you to speak those thoughts and feelings, make real the doubts that sit within myself so I may truly dispel them. I rely on you, in a way. We are that which the other is not.

Is this not the foundation of love?

Unstoppable, Immovable

I tire. Do you know this? I falter and strain and suffer just the same as anypony else. I am not all sugar and speed, all pink noise static. I breathe and therefore must also pause for breath. You believe me, right? Of course you do. Of course you do! You know this better than anypony else. You sense it, even. When I need comfort you provide it. When I need rest you’re right there beside me, holding me close against the softness of your spirit and it is against you that I understand.

You described me once. We were younger and stupider then, filled with all the joyous idiocy of our youth. You, flush-drunk off Apple reserve, compared me to an unstoppable force. Without limits and direction, you said. I don't know if you meant it. I understand it now though. I am not unstoppable. You are not immovable. We stop and move and laugh and cry and carry on, a whirlwind only you and I can ever appreciate.

Is that selfish? The belief that only I appreciate us, that only you appreciate us? Perhaps it is. To tell the truth I do not care. I want your selfish thoughts, your bitter feelings that twist in your gut late at night when it feels that all the stars have gone away. We can bare the worst parts of ourselves and it is through this that we can bear them, live through them, and indeed prosper through it all!

Prosper for as long as we are able to, at least. It tugs at my heart some days; the thought that you will be without me in some far future. Who, then, will make you laugh, lover mine? And who will make my heart sing? Where will all the light go when we’re gone? I know you can’t tell me. Even if you knew I wouldn’t want to hear it. This unknowing, this cluelessness, is the beauty of love.

I think you’d agree.

How? In any world, in any span of time, how did we swim up the same river? What am I supposed to make of you, when you spend hours by my side without complaint, without flagging at all. What am I supposed to do with myself in the hours before your return? I’ve tried to study, to understand the nature of the feelings that sit balled up tight in my unruly chest, but they refuse to unfurl without you around. That would be fine then if I could study in your presence. If you didn’t steal away every moment — if I could call giving my time willingly theft at all. Every single breath the world gives me I’d give to you if you’d let me.

I know you not at all but still well enough to know you’d deny me. You’d deny my limitless breath, you’d deny the stretch of my wings, you’d deny the flute of my horn. You accept, however, the wrap of my wings around you. This is good, I think to myself, as I cling tight to the promise of another moment with you here in my life. This is more than good. This is the limit of language, the failing of the words we’ve been given to describe the shape of a thing that is outside of us.

I once tried to understand you and failed. Now I seek to understand us, the passage of love between two disparate bodies, and I think I see the face of god in the tresses of your mane. It seems to me that the whole of the universe, the limitless expanse of the potential of our lives rests in the curls that frame your smiling face. As you press against my side with exuberance I’m beset by the reality of love and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it! I want to stand up, to fling my wings out and flail my hooves to the ceiling and scream all my love out until I’m spent.

That, however, would mean peeling our bodies apart. I liken it to the splitting of an atom, to cleaving the very fabric of ourselves in twain, for to part from you is to suffer beyond what my mortal body allows. I bear it still, for the good of us both, but it is only for the promise of a return to our bound state that I bear it at all. I would bear a thousand days cleft from you for one kiss, one sweet sugar caress of tender affection, but lucky mare am I that you seem to be in ample supply. Indeed, it’s hard to escape your attention without the pepper of you against me.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.