Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt XI
From the journal of Sunburst, July 2, YS 1329:

This whole day, I couldn’t stop thinking about something every pegasus knows: that history always repeats itself.

No battle is ever the end of all war.

No peace is ever eternal.

This awareness is in our blood, our bones, our feathers, our souls. Pegasi stand eternally ready to fight because we know nothing lasts. We know it’s all fleeting. The greatest commanders and queens do their great works, and then die. The clouds bear us up, our islands in the sky, then dissipate and dissolve into thin air or coalesce into rain and fall away to the rivers and seas. The sun shines, then sets. The moon waxes, then wanes. Even the stars themselves burn bright, then choke and burst out someday.

Then it all comes back around, and it all happens again.

Against it all, we fight to hold on as long as we can.

History always repeats itself. We always fight the same battle, again, and again, and again, forever.

Fighting it is what we know how to do, but what good is it, really? How many times do we really keep what matters, in the end? How many lovers were doomed to be torn apart by the vast tides of fate they couldn’t possibly prevail against, no matter how hard they battled in savage desperation to hold something, anything, of what they had?

It’s all happened before, and it’s all still happening.

History always repeats itself.

Countless times, over and over.

Applejack and Rainbow Dash.

One in the ground, and one brought to the ground in anguish.

My mind wouldn’t stop spiraling around it, around and around this, like a dark condor soaring on a thermal of hot rising entropy.

By the afternoon, I was exhausted by these relentlessly hopeless thoughts.

I tried to take a nap to escape them.

But when I fell asleep, I dreamed.

I dreamed about the sun-warmed dirt under my hooves in a field of sunflowers. I dreamed of moving rainclouds to water them, then clearing the clouds to let the sun shine on them again. I dreamed of chasing a thieving crow out of the vegetable garden, flying in hot pursuit after her, burning inside with an unreasoning fury and harrying her endlessly over farm fields through a surreal fiery orange sunset sky, because in desperation and pain I didn’t know what else to do but fight—something, anything.

I woke up with a jolt, thinking about these things, remembering.

It’s all happened before, and it’s all still happening.

History always repeats itself.

Countless times, over and over.

My mother and my father.

Myself, left as the only winged misfit in a little earth pony farm town I couldn’t make myself belong in, drifting on the storm-waves of a divorce years in the making because my parents being in love wasn’t enough by itself to stop the ship of their marriage from peeling apart plank by creaking plank in slow motion.

Some part of me must have known what I needed and decided to give me the kick it took, because with the rattling shake of those dreams, something finally broke loose. I screamed into my pillow and the tears finally came out.

Once the gates were opened, I started to cry for them, too. Applejack and Rainbow Dash, I mean. I thought of my parents, torn apart by the conflicted calls of the sky and the land, but they were still alive. We could all still see each other in the small doses which suited them. Special occasions. Visits for a day or two. But when I thought of Applejack… of Rainbow Dash, her wife torn away by the swallowing earth, of Applejack, an earth pony to the marrow of her very bones just as much as Rainbow Dash was a pegasus in every fiber… how I knew one was departed for the eternity of the ground in the earth pony tradition of burial, and the other destined someday for the far reaches of the sky in the pegasus rite of cremation.

From the sky we come, and the sky gives us life, and to the sky we return, rising on the smoke, flying away with the ashes on the wind. But when one of us falls in love with an earth pony who can’t follow, who goes instead to the dark vault of the swallowing dirt, how can we face eternity knowing this separation from our beloved? What does that do to somepony? To feel that unbridgeable distance, that loss, with no reunion, ever?

In being reminded of the visceral sense of the divide between my mother and my father left for me in their breaking apart, a gate of comprehension and commiseration was opened. I suddenly felt—not knew from outside at a distance, but felt as if it was my own—how a pain so much worse even than that could sink a pony below the horizon of having any will to keep going.

So I cried.

I cried and I cried, for more than an hour, until my eyes were stinging and burning, and my throat was sore, and my ribs ached like I’d been kicked over and over. I cried until I poured it all out.

But when it was over, I felt better. I felt clear in a way I hadn’t been able to feel for days.

From the catharsis of the storm comes the rainbow.

Every pegasus knows it, because every pegasus knows that history always repeats itself.

The waters of the sea always evaporate to create new clouds. The sun always rises once more. The moon always waxes again.

Though we may be brought to the ground, we always find a way to fly another day. No matter how hard she crashed, Rainbow Dash soars again now, just like Aunt Spitfire said.

Because history always repeats itself.

Because no battle is ever the end of all war.

Because no peace is ever eternal.

Because fighting is what we know how to do, not just to hold on to what was, but to make the most of what will be.

It’s all happened before, and it’s all still happening.

And this may all come back again someday, this sadness, this haunting by the ghosts of who and what was lost. It may bloom again, when the white roses bloom in spring, as they always will. But for now? For now it’s passed, washed away in the rain like the dust always is. For now, the sun is finally out again, and what my time at the wall taught me is that when the sun shines, the joy and the light is too valuable not to appreciate for every moment it lasts.

So let that be the end of it, for now, and for a long time to come. No more grey clouds. Not from this. Not in my skies.
 
 
Enough tears for today.