How can something be real after it’s gone?
Endless
By Winston
The far reaches of the sky are cold with dry-ice winds, and lonely with the kind of loneliness that comes from being so far away from everything that it all disappears. Most of all—most of all—they’re absolutely enormous. There’s no sense of scale. The clouds in the distance are so big and so far away they feel dreamlike; a living, slow-moving mural painted on the background of reality. Being up here makes me feel small in ways that I can’t even fully articulate because I don’t know if I can completely comprehend it myself.
Up here, so high I can feel the thinness of the air, I feel lost. I’m barely a tiny speck in a blue limitless expanse. I could pick any direction and just fly, and fly, and fly, without ever stopping, and I would never reach the end because there is no end to it; it just goes on forever. The mind of a pony can’t fully comprehend something that is truly endless in the way the sky is endless. I feel like I’m everywhere and nowhere because when there’s no end anywhere, no distinction of place relative to a boundary, those two things are the same.
I’m lost, but I can’t be lost, because to be lost you have to not know where you are, and I know where I am up here: I’m everywhere, because I’m nowhere, here where there is no here because there is no there, because there is no difference.
I’m so high up I can barely even see the ground below through the haze, and the endless blue in every direction forever swallows me completely, here, where I’m nowhere and everywhere. It holds me, and comforts me.
It scares me so, so much.
It scares me because I don’t know what to do with something so endless.
The roses on my desk are deep burgundy, the color of red wine, deep and dark with the vivid rich hue of blood from a vein. Each petal is a soft fold of finest silk, but finer, spun by no mortal silkworm, woven by no mere pony’s loom.
The scent they bear is erotic warm summer nights under a full moon, subtle and overpowering and unmistakable. When it hits my nose, it’s all I can think about, trying to handle the rush of associations their delicate, complex, intoxicating smell brings with it. It fills my mind, making the thoughts it brings impossible to ignore.
It’s very distracting, and I have work to do. My night can’t just be sitting here daydreaming about being softly kissed on the neck, being touched and caressed and gently guided willingly over to the bed, climbing in with her, making love while—
Ahem.
See what I mean? Very distracting.
I mean, I can let those fantasies be my whole night, of course. Nopony’s going to tell me no, like I’m a foal trying to have cookies for breakfast. It’s just that I know I really shouldn’t. Anything on my desk that doesn’t get done tonight is one more thing waiting for me tomorrow.
I could get rid of them. Maybe I should get rid of them. Some inkling of an idea out of the back corners of my mind says I should.
I know I won’t. It’s not an idea I’m willing to grapple with. They mean too much, and not just about sex.
When I look into those deep rich red petals glowing under the soft light of my office’s night illumination crystals, I feel so many things. I feel warmth. I feel appreciated. I feel friendship. I feel loved.
I feel their ephemerality. I feel them dying.
I feel how beautiful their impermanence makes them, because it anchors them in time: because it sets such a clear definition on their boundaries, because it makes them into something here, and now, and so profoundly whole and graspable in those terms.
I feel so sad, knowing they’re going away so soon.
They break my heart at the same time they bring me so much joy.
“Something’s on your mind, Twilight.” Cadance speaks from where she lays on a rich red satin chaise-lounge next to me, with her head propped up comfortably while she relaxes. Our weekly hangouts are some of her only times to really unwind, and I can’t blame her for taking the full opportunity to do so.
I look at my sister. That’s maybe not what the law would call her, but I stopped thinking of her as just my sister-in-law a long time ago. Real family isn’t always strictly blood alone. It’s who you find, who you choose, and who chooses you.
We chose each other, and we’ve been close in the way family is close for so long that she just knows, so it would do no good denying it. And anyway, I’m not here to deny anything. I came here hoping she would be able to tell, in fact.
“You’re quiet today,” she says, looking back at me, staring into me with her big purple eyes under dark, long, beautiful lashes. “When you’re quiet, you’re thinking.”
She’s right. I guess this is my way of telling her I need to tell her something, because verbalizing something like what I’m thinking about isn’t always easy. That’s why I came to her. She knows the idiosyncratic paths of communication, the ways I tend to say things nonverbally because it’s… I don’t know. It’s easier? It’s more intuitive to me? Whatever it is, she gets me, and I love her for it.
Besides, even if we weren’t so frictionless, I’d still be here, because this… thing on my mind… it’s her domain. I owe her the consultation, at the very least.
“Spit it out,” she prompts me gently, kindly.
“How can something be real after it’s gone?” I blurt out, puzzling over my cup of hot cocoa on the end-table between us.
“What, like…” She glances at my mug. “You need more hot chocolate?”
I shake my head. “No, I—” I’m not completely sure how to broach this. I would like more hot chocolate, if merely in the sense that I wouldn’t say no if it was already here and conveniently at-hoof, but that’s really not what I care the least bit about. Not today.
I decide I’m just going to have to start and see where it goes. “You were a pegasus. You know… before.” My eyes flick to her horn.
She gives me a brief, tiny smile. “I sure was. What about it?”
I feel silly even asking this question. “Did you ever, or, I guess, still ever, get this… urge… to just… fly? Out into the sky, as high as you can go, until everything else disappears, and the sky is all there is, and you’re just out there, floating all alone in endless blue, feeling like it could be anywhere and you could just fly away and keep going forever?” The words pour out of me, probably too many, but it’s hard to stop once I’ve started.
“Skylost.” She nods, her eyes briefly distant with memory. “Yes. Pegasi have a word for what I think you’re feeling. It’s called being skylost. The sense of being adrift in a sky with no end, and being so small you could disappear in it completely—and, sometimes, wanting to disappear in it.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “That sounds about right.”
“I’m not surprised.” She pauses. “I used to be drawn to it, too, you know. I get what you mean. Sometimes the sky was the only thing that felt real. Sometimes I used to hide up there, when all of… you know. This. Everything mundane. Life on the ground. When it felt like too much, too tedious.”
“What stops you from just disappearing into it?” I ask.
“Well, pegasi also have an understanding that there’s somepony you always come home for,” she said. “Somepony who anchors you and brings you back.”
“Oh. Okay. But…”
“But what?”
“But I think that’s what I’m asking.” I start pacing in place. “How can that be… real, if it’s an anchor that can’t last? A pony or a thing that can’t last?”
“I don’t know, exactly. All I can tell you is I have my anchors in life, and they’re real to me.” Her voice is soft. “I’m sure you must have some things like that.”
“Maybe.” I think. “I guess I must. But lately it’s so hard to know anymore. The way things have changed. The way it’s… I’m… different… now.”
“Is this about…?” And now it’s her turn for her eyes to flick knowingly to my wings.
I nod glumly. “I think it is.”
“Okay.” She acknowledges me, then sips her own cup of cocoa, and sets it down again. She gets up off her couch, takes a couple steps, and sits down next to me, close and comforting. I can feel the warmth radiating off of her body. “Now, what’s this REALLY about?” she asks, ever so softly.
And with that, I’m here, at the moment of truth. My tongue almost stumbles, but cooperates surprisingly easily after a split second. “Rainbow Dash gave me a bouquet of the most beautiful red roses you’ve ever seen,” I sigh.
“Did she?” My sister smirks. “How tragic! That sounds horrible!”
“I know, right?!” I smirk back.
We both break out laughing.
“I take it these were not just obligatory ‘Thank You’ or ‘Condolences’ flowers,” she states, once she’s done giggling.
“Correct,” I respond.
“So she’s into you, huh?” Cadance ribs me, with a big grin growing on her face.
“I don’t— that is, she didn’t say it outright, in so many words,” I fumble to explain. “That’s not really her style, I think. But the message is… you know. Pretty clear.”
“Alright. And is the feeling mutual?”
That’s the problem, right there. “I don’t know,” I mumble, staring at the floor.
“Do you want it to be?”
I don’t have an answer for that.
She gives me a moment before she speaks again. “What are you afraid of, Twilight?” She hits the nail on the head, the way I knew she would. I realize this is really the question I’m here to answer. I came here because she can make it easier. But she can’t do it for me. I’m the one on the hook for that part. Now I get to find out if I can do it at all.
“I’m scared she’ll go away.” It’s easier to say than I thought, somehow.
“You mean you’re scared that she can’t last.” Cadance nods. “Because she’s not an alicorn.”
“Yes, and not just that. What if… what if it doesn’t work between us? What if she leaves? What if I have to leave? What if I hurt her? What if we hurt each other?” I fret, spilling it out at last, these things I hadn’t said even to myself before now, these things that live inside but only really take a conscious form when they turn into words. “What if it’s—”
“Twilight.” Cadence addresses me firmly, interrupting my catastrophic ramble. “You’re Twilighting.”
“I know. I know!” I take a deep breath and stop myself.
“Now, look. Those are all possibilities,” Cadence concedes. “But have you considered that it might actually work?”
My mouth opens and closes like a fish. I want to say several things at once. Yes, I had considered it. No, I’m not sure I actually believed it. I don’t know, it all seems so imaginary and abstract right now, just fantasies that I’m not sure how to make real.
“How did you do it?” I ask instead, timidly. “How did you make it work?”
“It worked because I love Shining Armor,” she says simply.
“But what if that’s not enough?” I ask despondently. “Sometimes two ponies love each other but they break up anyway. You can love somepony and they can love you, but still not be good for each other.”
“If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work.” She shrugs. “There are no guarantees, Twilight. But there are chances, and taking your chance is all you can do. For me, there was never any question. And I’m not you, but… well. I wouldn’t trade the chance I had for anything.”
“I guess I’m really just afraid it’ll hurt,” I admit.
“It might.” She nods somberly. “But even if it does, maybe it’s worth it. If me and Shining Armor hadn’t worked out in the long run, I still wouldn’t regret at least trying. But if I missed my opportunity because I didn’t even take a shot? Now that, I would regret.”
“So you’re saying there’s just as much of a risk of ending up even worse off by doing nothing,” I conclude. “Damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.”
“Maybe it feels that way.” She pats me on the withers with one wing. “And I understand your fear of jumping in, because I’m already in that position. There will be pain for me, I know. Shining Armor will die someday. I guess the trick, if you want to call it that, is that I don’t think about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t change anything,” she explains. “Something doesn’t always have to last forever to be good, and to be real. I’d rather have loved him in the time we have together and then spend ten thousand years as a widow than to never have loved him at all. I’ll never stop loving him, even after he’s gone. He’ll live forever in my heart, and in that way he’ll always be real to me. That’s what real is, Twilight. Real is what changes you. Real is what gives real meaning to you, in some way.”
“Right,” I agree. “I guess that’s true.”
“And I think that’s what part of you already knows,” she goes on. “You wouldn’t be so scared if you didn’t think there was something real in whatever you have going on with Rainbow Dash. Whatever those roses mean has to be real to you to be so frightening, because things that aren’t real can’t hurt you. Isn’t that true?”
The weight of how right she is finally cuts to the heart of why I’m here. This is what I needed to hear. I think I knew it going in, I just needed somepony with the authority to say it to me. It breaks open a reservoir of something I was keeping walled up, unable to grab and face directly until now. Before I realize it, tears are running down my face.
“Yes,” I sob.
Cadance sweeps me into a hug, wrapping me in her big pink wings. I cling to her, enveloped in her soft fur and her scent—faintly bubblegum, and floral, and traces of the conditioner that makes her beautiful long mane so soft and perfect, and under it all her natural pleasantly feminine essence.
“Whatever happens, Twilight, whatever you choose… it’ll be okay,” she reassures me from within her embrace. “It’ll be okay.”
The far reaches of the sky are cold with dry-ice winds, and they only get colder with the sunset. I had forgotten how long I’ve been up here. It was long enough for the day to end, apparently.
A half-heeded voice of concern in my mind says this was longer than I’d planned, and longer than I’d made arrangements for.
I tune it out. I have a right to my time, especially at times like this. It’s just a day, anyway, and not long enough for anypony to really miss me too much.
The chill breezes at these heights are ferocious enough to sting my eyes, and freeze-drying enough to have begun to wither and stiffen the red rose I plucked out of the bouquet to carry here with me. The petals look so thin and delicate and suffused with fine wrinkles where once they’d been so silky and lush and smooth.
But their color hasn’t changed. They’re as deeply wine-red as ever, and the intensity of the hue’s impact is just as intoxicating.
The sun’s setting has deepened the blue of the sky as well, over the rainbow band of colors encircling the far horizon in every direction. The sky above is deep indigo, dyed like the most intense fabric of the finest dress, and like a truly fine dress, I feel invited into it, wrapped in the comfort of it surrounding me.
As the day ends, my red rose gives its life over to the darkening blue sky. I watch while the petals shiver in the winds, drying, shrinking, concentrating down to their last bits of essence. In a fascinated rapture, I can’t look away. For long minutes, while the fading horizon light dims in pinks and oranges and reds, the endless blue of the sky grows deeper while the rose dries, casting its water into the sky, letting it drink it away without resistance.
Finally, it’s done. The rose has lasted as long as it can. The petals lose their grasp, and one by one, tear free and hurl themselves into the gale-force winds rushing past. Each one flies away on the wind in an instant, losing itself into the endless blue, leaping to its destiny and sailing off into the limitless expanses of the sky. They could be up here forever, as far as I know or can ever know.
And each one dances in the wind, twisting and spinning with crazy frenetic joy, in the brief second or so before I lose sight of it completely against the darkening sky and it disappears and the two merge together into eternity.
At some point a while back the empty, dry, brittle stem of the rose had slipped from my grasp, unnoticed. I don’t know when. I don’t really care. I don’t really care about anything right now. I don’t want anything from the world below. I’ve shed my awareness of time and of how long I’ve stayed up here, skylost.
Eventually, with an effort, I think about it and determine it can’t really be very long. The sun is completely below the horizon by now, but not by much. There’s still a faint trace of sky glow showing where it was. Exactly opposite in the dome of the heavens, the moon looms just above the edge of the land, huge and full and shining with cold light like polished silver.
I could gaze at that moon forever, and for a while I think I might, except that at some point another light intervenes. It’s a smaller light, white but fringed on its edges with the glint of yellows and greens and purples and orange and red, like a prism beam glittering through a raindrop. This light is below the horizon—not all the way down on the ground but not nearly up at the kind of lofty, lonely heights that I’m hiding away in.
It speaks to the part of me that wants to stop hiding.
It calls me to come back down.
It wants me to come home. I feel the pull almost tangibly. I don’t resist, because deep down inside I realize I want to cooperate.
My wings almost have a life of their own as they turn subtly, angling into a glide that leads me to a controlled descent toward the beacon of warm light. Dropping altitude loosens the pull of gravity, and I feel lighter, giving my insides that floating feeling of a long drop. The winds buffet me, tempting me back upward, but instinct steers me through them to stay on target, turning and flaring my feathers to course-correct and airbrake as needed.
As I glide and fall further and further, over long minutes the winds lose their forcefulness and become more familiar, more mild and navigable. The air grows thicker. I start to warm up, a pleasant sensation after so long in the high cold.
The light, white-yellow and rainbow dappled, grows brighter. Before much longer, I can resolve the separate sources of light: the main white lights coming from inside Rainbow Dash’s cloud-house, and their reflections and refractions off the rainbow-colored pools and misting waterfalls running off the sides.
I’m close enough now to be making visible progress second by second as the cloud house grows closer. My heart has its own guidance system, guiding me in, seeking to return to its anchoring.
Before I know it, I’m there, inches off the fluff-substrate on which the house rests. My wings flare, air-braking my leisurely forward momentum to a final stop, and my hooves touch down softly. I stand in Rainbow Dash’s yard, and the only sound is the gentle murmur of the rainwater pools in her cloud-landscaping flowing in small rivulets into the weather magic that turns them into the mist-falls that catch and scatter light into the rainbow cascades that fall continually from her home.
Her lights are on. I know she’s home and she’s awake.
I’m shaking.
I notice it in my hooves when I try to take my first steps toward her door. It’s also in my wings. It’s in the faint twitches of the muscles in my back. I try to tell myself I have nothing to be afraid of, but I don’t think that’s what my trembling is about.
Somehow, I reach her door, and I knock. The time between my knocking and her answering is simultaneously an eternity and practically nonexistent.
“Twilight?” She stares at me from the open door.
“Hi Rainbow.” I can’t think of anything else to say, now that I’m here, now that this is real. I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Wasn’t expecting you.” She smiles. “C’mon in, though!”
“Thanks.” I follow her in through the doorway.
“So what brings you out this way at this hour?” she asks. “Everything alright?” She starts leading me down the hall.
“Yeah, fine, I guess.” I shrug, following her. “I was just out for a flight and I saw your lights on and stuff, so… you know… I thought, why not say hi? And, uh… you know… and… stuff.”
She turns her head back over her withers and gives me a funny look. “You sure you’re feeling alright? No offense, but you didn’t really sound like you just then, if you get what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” I shake my head. “Honestly, I do feel a little off. There’s just been something on my mind lately.”
Rainbow nods. “Hey, you want a cider? I’ll grab you one, and you can tell me about it,” she offers. “You know, if you want.”
Good Celestia, could I use a cider. “Yes! That would be great!” I’m slightly too enthusiastic, maybe, but Rainbow doesn’t notice. I think.
“Comin’ right up!” She disappears into the kitchen. When I’m alone, stewing in the silence left by her departure and waiting in the awkward indeterminate seconds for her return, I wince and kick myself for letting this slack space open up and drag down the momentum of the moment. All it does is to create that much more risk of losing my nerve.
But that’s silly. What am I afraid of? Nothing, I know, for the thousandth time.
I’m anxious anyway, all the same. All the logic in the world can’t reason it away sometimes. Maybe it shouldn’t be able to, either. Not for things like this. If I could just turn off my emotions like flipping a switch, it would take away what’s truly special about—
Rainbow’s walking back from the kitchen, carrying two bottles, their caps snapped off. She passes one to me, and I take it.
*tink*
We tap our bottles together. Rainbow takes a long pull from hers, and I sip mine.
I start drifting into the living room, and Rainbow follows, not far behind. We set our bottles down on a table by the couch.
“So what’s up, Twi?” Rainbow asks, guardedly. It occurs to me that she has to be wondering if this is about what I came here for it to be about. It’s probably making her anxious too, just as much as me. Maybe that makes me feel a little better, knowing I’m not alone.
“I have to tell you something.” I start dithering in slow paces, feeling restless in the hooves.
“Yeah, okay. What?” She seems like she’s bracing herself inside, if not outwardly.
“It’s that, uh. I… well, what I mean is, the… ummm…”
I clear my throat and my stomach turns. When I stop fumbling my ineffectual words and silence takes over in the space between us, it ratchets the tension to an unbearable height. My throat feels like it has a steel cable around it. My wings flutter at my sides.
With all my will, I force my hooves to stop, and I stand directly in front of Rainbow, and I stare into her beautiful rose-colored eyes, and I’m trying to speak, but my words won’t word.
Except one. One shows up, so I take it and run.
“Yes.”
Rainbow blinks. “…Yes what?”
I take a moment to remember to breathe, in and out, once, and compose myself. Yes what? Right, I guess I’d better do that part next. I arrange my thoughts and give it my best stab.
“I know what you were asking with those roses you gave me the other day.” I breathe again. Being able to get some words out there as a foothold breaks the worst of the tension and gives me something to work with. It helps immensely. My impulses loosen up inside me, breaking past the instinct to freeze and letting me animate myself again.
I step in close to Rainbow Dash, and I kiss her cheek, long and gently, then rub my own cheek against hers. “I realized what you were asking, so that’s what I needed to tell you. Yes, Rainbow. My answer is yes. I want you.”
Rainbow lets out a faint slightly choked sound, wordless and muffled. She throws her forelegs around me, hugging me tight. “Oh thank Celestia and Luna.” There’s a hitch in her speech, like she’s on the verge of joyful tears. She kisses me on the neck, her breath warm as it rolls through my fur. “I thought I mighta screwed up super bad with those roses. But I had to try.”
“Taking your chance isn’t screwing up, Rainbow.” I hug her back. I rest my muzzle in her sky-blue fur, in the crook between her wing and her back, and I breathe her in, the scent of feathers and rain and ozone and the morning mist at dawn and rainbows, all the most beautiful things the majesty and the power of the sky’s weather brings to sustain the roses of life that grow below it.
We spend a long, long time just holding each other, luxuriating in each other’s presence, feeling each other breathe and basking in the other’s warmth. I feel like I could spend the rest of forever there, a limitless expanse of time, and never once for a moment want it to end. For an eternity, I soak in the presence of her rainbow mane, her blue fur, her blue feathers, all of it, all of her, as I hold her close. I’m lost, but I can’t be lost, because to be lost you have to not know where you are, and I know where I am: I’m with her.
And here, drifting in her endless blue, I am truly happy.
