Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt V
From the journal of Sunburst, May 28, YS 1329:

I don’t think Princess Twilight actually likes her palace all that much. I’m sure she’d never say it out loud, but it seems to be getting more and more apparent now that I’ve been here for a little while.

The other day, some of the large paintings in one of the main halls were removed for cleaning and restoration work. Temporary replacements were going to be hung. When the princess was asked which ones she preferred, she would only say that she didn’t care, they could put up posters of the Great and Powerful Trixie (whoever that is) for all it mattered. She sounded annoyed to even have the subject brought up.

After that, out of curiosity I started paying more attention to what decorations actually do matter to her. The answer seems to be none of them. She never really looks at the paintings or the statues or whatever other artifacts line the hallways. I think they’re just so much clutter to her.

I wonder how this princess got here. She seems so out of place—not on the surface, I mean, but underneath, with a sense of it growing in the subtle things I keep seeing the longer I’m here. Every day I stand guard and end up watching her during official business or even during what should be her personal time, it feels like she’s more distant from every other pony. She seems very alone; the kind of alone a pony can feel even in a huge crowd.

She watches other ponies. She studies them. I can see her doing it, and feel somehow as if I know exactly what’s going through her head when she looks right through the ponies who come to her court like they were made of glass. She watches and she sees and she understands. She’s very, very smart, anypony can see it as easy as anything.

But she is alone.

It’s like she’s a sculpture made of ice. She’s the centerpiece of the table, and everypony can see her, admire her, look up at her in awe of her majestic form and presence… but nopony would dare touch her. They know and she knows some sort of barrier of cold makes it impossible, too painful to endure the frostbite.

It’s a little like an accusation my own mother teased me with in the past, when I continually failed to ever have a date or hang out with any other ponies from school.

“If you’re going to be an ice queen,” she said, “you’ll never have any friends.”

At the time I stopped myself from impulsively answering completely honestly by saying I thought that would be fine with me. Saying something like that would have upset her. She wouldn't have understood.

I think she was just worried about thinking I was having social difficulty. She wasn’t wrong. Oh, I guess it’s gotten better since. I can talk to other ponies without much trouble. I’ve had friends, but they haven’t been the center of my life, is all. They’ve always just been the sort of friends that are a peripheral feature of the place I happen to be. They’ve always been the kind that have to get left behind when I leave, I suppose. I just never really met anypony I stayed in touch with across the distance. I don’t know why, exactly. The bond was just never all that deep.

The princess seems kind of like that in her own way. She’s personable enough. She’s polite and everypony who comes through here seems to take away a good impression of her. I like how she can talk about anything and make it relatable, and she can make decisions and make them understandable even if they’re not what you wanted to hear. Most importantly, she’s always honest, not just a politician with a silver tongue.

She would easily make a lot more friends, I think, if she was anypony else but the princess. I suppose the demands of her office don’t really allow it. She stays here, they move on, and that’s that. The only lasting constant is the constant movement enforcing detachment.

I guess we’re the same, in that way, the distance from everypony else. How we got here is the difference. I know that I chose this because I’m comfortable with it. This is where it’s easy for me to be. But what about her?

Is this who she is, or is it who she’s made to be as the price for being Princess Twilight Sparkle?

My kind being the exception among most ponies, I have to think it’s the latter.

I almost wish I could just ask her without that being a horribly inappropriate affront to the decorum of subordination that must, of course, be kept between the royalty and her guard.

Maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg problem that even she doesn’t know how to solve. Nopony can really get close enough to ask her why she doesn’t like her palace, and that’s why she doesn't like her palace. I think she came from somewhere smaller, where she was smaller… somewhere she misses. I can only guess maybe there’s some ponies she misses too, because in a smaller place they could get closer. Moving here just meant moving into a big cage, with bars that don’t keep her in so much as they keep everypony else out.

As a guard, maybe I’m one of those bars. It’s a strange feeling, and not really a good one. If I am, I don't want to be, but the job is what it is.

Day by day it’s becoming increasingly clear that princesses are not necessarily the creatures they seem to be on the surface. I wonder what else I’ll discover before I’m done here.
 
 
Well, I think I’ve discovered enough for today.