I've Done It a Hundred Times
You never knew how long it had been when you woke up. The world appeared as you left it, but the fun had been had, and it was back to the same old. That was the problem with husk. It was great until it was over, and you couldn’t smoke it all the time. If you could have, there’d’ve been no problems at all. It was precisely because you couldn’t that the problems appeared. You had to go to work. You had to go to eat. You had to go to drink. You had to kiss your wife and hold your child.
Shining Armor grimaced and swallowed. There was a nasty flavour on his gums; his throat was sour. Sighing, holding his head, he stumbled to the en suite. He turned on a tap, stooped and drank, eyes closed as he swallowed mechanically. He wiped his mouth with a dirty towel and squinted into the mirror. His mane was lank and compressed from having been slept on. He dragged a comb through it and cursed as it pulled at sticky hairs. He spat. He drank more. He took his toothbrush and globbed on a hunk of paste. Unhelpfully, it felt and tasted awful – thin, minty slobber. The more thoroughly he brushed the more it dribbled down his chin. Once he was done, he hawked up phlegm and spat again a couple times. Then he rinsed and gulped down another few mouthfuls of water. Frowning slightly, he stretched his neck from side to side. Click, crunch, crackle. He’d slept twisted, could feel it in his spine. He gritted his teeth as he spotted tar on the sheets and the pipe itself, staining the carpet. He closed his eyes, sighing again. He turned and tugged on a drawer. He paused, blinked and pulled out of it his manuscript. He opened the compartment below, grabbed a pair of socks, tossed them onto the bed and read over the paper, humming the last melody he’d written. Music – the truest freedom in existence, each piece a hidden place among places, like a tiny, crystalline world strewn on a shelf or, indeed, stashed above a sock drawer.
He found a pencil and picked up completing the countermelody he’d started. He had backed himself into a corner with a clunky leap in the bass and consecutive octaves. He scratched it out and began again. Contrary motion. Focus. Yes, much better. He hummed the upper line and imagined the lower melody against it. It needed a middle voice. He wondered whether it was correct to start with an eight-five. No, surely, it wasn’t; that was too old-fashioned, too bare. An eight-six? No, that couldn’t be considered the tonic harmony. An eight-three, then. No, the voicing was weak – a tight third followed by a gaping sixth – but he couldn’t change the top note, since he had already composed the outer voices. Then an eight-five it was, nicely spaced, a fourth atop a fifth. When he thought about it in context, he could appreciate the why behind so many of the old musicians’ decisions. He wrote in the note and moved on to the next, and the next issue promptly emerged. Conjunct motion was preferable, of course, yet he couldn’t reach the following note without a leap. Well, he could if he left the middle voice where it was, but he’d have no third again and an ugly octave doubling the fifth. What were his options? Leap to the octave? Not only would he be missing a third but he’d be making a direct fifth. Leap down to the third? It was a cramped voicing between the lower notes and a giant gap between the upper. In other words, he couldn’t maintain a satisfying effect without changing the outer voices, which rendered his previous efforts in vain. He sighed and rubbed his head. He set aside the manuscript and worked his mouth.
It was easy for a stallion to feel fulfilled. Freedom and passion – that was all he needed, the space in which to be happy and something he loved to keep him so. Time was Shining Armor could have sat in a room all day and composed. He’d scribbled canons in the mess hall, hummed chorales in the courtyard and finished fugues before bed. Then he had married, and his music had become boring, and his lines had grown poor, and his counterpoint had slowed, and he’d had to re-read books at two pages a day simply to remember how to do things properly, and it was all for nothing because he hadn’t the time to write out anything neatly let alone see about getting somepony to play it. He had passion, but he didn’t have freedom anymore. Even the passion was dwindling. Hard emotion faded with age. It was as though you got washed by the rain. The more you lived the less you felt until, one day, you were shrugging your shoulders around a table as the miseries of a thousand ponies were read aloud to you in a report. And the older you grew the harder it became to lead a pure life; perhaps that was because you were trying to feel again. But each high had its end. The boredom returned and, worst of all, so did the sad knowledge that this was where his choices had taken him. He loved Cadance; he did. But he didn’t feel it. He was becoming as much a husk as those with which he loaded his pipe. He sighed, stood and went to check on the baby.
Flurry Heart’s cries – for, surely, there would have been cries – had gone unnoticed. Her eye had bled so much that her blankets had crusted. She was shaking with little sound, as though in a trance, while her father rushed her to hospital. As Shining Armor sat in the waiting room to hear whether there’d be permanent damage, he couldn’t stop thinking about the bowl he’d smoke the moment he got home.
