Twilight leant back in her chair and knit her brow. She bit on her tongue, harder than she had really intended to.
No.
That wasn't right. She'd bit exactly as hard as she intended. Rather she bit harder than she had expected to intend to. Was the difference significant? Maybe. It felt significant, but what even was significance? Did anything even matter?
Black did.
Rather did so the lack of it. The conspicuous absence on the field of white. Perfect white. Almost hurt to look at. Hurt her eyes and mind, scalding, licking flames wrapped around corneas blowing synapses apart. Just please get rid of the white, that was all she wanted.
But she leaned back in her chair and knit her brow. For the… how many times was it? When had she even leant forward again? At times like this it wouldn’t do to keep count. All of the mind was needed to focus on making something on the page. Some bold strokes that would convey all the rattled spare thoughts bouncing around in what increasingly felt less like a mind and more like a deconstruction of the concept of thought.
Like soup, like smashed viscera, like smoke, like nothing.
The thoughts bouncing around in Twilight’s mind were driving her insane. She wanted to bite her tongue out. She’d tried to bite her tongue out just then. So much harder than she had anticipated to intend. She forgot, where had she landed on the previous question? On whether the bite force had been significant?
When had she leant forward again?
White was significant. White mattered.
She looked at the page and gripped her quill. Long since had she abandoned hornwriting in favour of regaining the physicality of hoof on implement. Surely, for a true artist, the sensation would matter, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it matter?
White mattered.
White mattered so much and all Twilight wanted was to know why? Did it matter because of the potential it provided? Bold strokes yet to be made permanent, all still existing in the conceptual cubist daydream that her head felt like. But that was it, there wasn’t anything in her mind. And that was why white mattered, wasn’t it? It mattered because it wasn’t the thrill of potential, it was the mockery of nothing at all. It was the page laughing at her for not being able to transcribe all of this… this… this this that she was feeling and making something beautiful from it.
That was what the great artists did, wasn’t it Twilight? They took whatever they were feeling and made it into something era-defining. Something that permeated beyond convention, beyond genre, the enemy of cliche and the death of the pedestrian. Wasn’t that what pain was for? Wasn’t that what suffering was supposed to be? Did her suffering matter? Did anything except for white?
Twilight leant back in her chair and rubbed the sides of her head with her hooves. It was gradual at first, but then the motion became more and more frantic. She applied more pressure, she bit her tongue exactly as hard as she intended to and felt something warm spread throughout her mouth. A foul metallic tang followed after, like the memory of pennies.
Twilight just wanted to take her quill and cover some of the white. Just for a bit, just for a short while. Just forever, only a masterpiece. Was that so much to ask? To write something that stunned her contemporaries and put all of them to silence? She had to be able to write a masterpiece because that’s what ponies did with pain.
All of them?
Yes, all of them.
Every single one of them except you, Twilight.
She had to make sense of this all and transcribe it through the lens of the brilliance which surely must come with pain and make it something beautiful, because otherwise what was the point? White mattered, black mattered, surely everything she was feeling had to matter? Did she even want it to? The thought felt both vital and terrifying.
There had to be some black to find in the white. She had been holding the quill for so long, she had wanted to write something for so long. Why wasn’t wanting to write the same as being able to write? Why was that the way it worked? It wasn’t fair.
Twilight hadn’t wanted to write in months.
She leant back in her chair and cast a glance to the pages. Yellowed white, curled edges, the sign of the bleeding of ink and the weather of progress. Grease from her hooves, sweat from her brow, fibres of lavender mixed into the rough tooth of the paper. Piles and piles of it, fattened on the praise of her friends. What wonderful things she had written.
But on her desk, the page was white. It was perfect, something closer to the divine than the muck and filth and shit of the physical world. Wouldn’t there be comfort in succumbing to the inevitable truth that we were all just stinking animals? That nothing mattered at all?
But white must have mattered. Otherwise what was the point in any of this?
Twilight leant back in her chair and bit her tongue and felt the blood fill her mouth and for a moment wanted to spit it onto the page. If white was agony, and black was salvation, surely redmust have been art? Right?
But the notion was short lived and all that Twilight could think of was the overwhelming mediocrity of it all. The pathetic sophomoric self-satisfied grin of the fool daubing her blood into the page. Because she was writing in her own essence, she was making the strokes and lines of her masterpiece with a very part of her.
The thought taunted her nearly as much as the white. That kind of obvious, overly-trodden ground was for others, not her. Not someone who wrote what she did.
So many comments, congratulations. Never mind that she didn’t believe most of it. Never mind the creeping dread of the burden of knowing her work was crowd-pleasing tat, formulated for those she knew would read it. A manipulation.
Twilight leant back in her chair and stared at the white, totally unmarked by sweat or blood or ink. She stared at the ridges and fibres. Maybe encoded into the microscopic variances was something beautiful. Maybe the white was the presence of all those manifested notions of her neuroses, bound in words to be something timeless.
Maybe all her time spent obsessing, mouldering in guilt and shame and panic was already written in something fundamental.
Maybe the transcription didn’t need to be made.
Maybe she deserved a break, regardless of all those screaming thoughts and the horrible things they told her, warped and steeped in bile, filtered through uncertainty and time until she didn’t know what was true.
Maybe nothing was true.
Maybe nothing mattered.
And until she made her glorious, wonderful, singular, era-defining, inimitable, pedestrian, boring, needless, unwanted, dime-a-dozen mark on this fucking page, all of those questions would remain unanswered.
Twilight leant back in her chair.
She put down her quill.
She hadn’t written anything.
She still felt the same.
Just like all the other nights.
She leant back in her chair.
She sighed.
She stared.
She bit her tongue.
She swallowed blood.
She leant back in her chair.
Twilight didn’t know whether her thoughts mattered.
She didn’t know whether white mattered.
She hadn’t come to an answer tonight.
She still hadn’t made all of this into something that mattered.
She still hadn’t gotten any certainty or catharsis.
Twilight leant back on her chair, then pushed away from her desk, and walked away.
She got to the doorway and took one final look at her desk.
Twilight didn’t know the answers to anything.
For tonight, that would have to be good enough.
