This isn't a love song, I'm through writing those for you

To my dearest friends,

I’m sorry to say, but I can stay in Ponyville no longer. My heart aches and I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but extenuating circumstances have come up. It goes without mention that I love and will miss you all terribly.

I imagine you all must be wondering what brought this on. As most of you know, the stress of my work, among other things, has been affecting me very awfully lately. I’ve just been a mess. Well, I went to see a therapist, one thing lead to another, and I agreed to let her try a new technique on me called hypnosis. That isn’t the problem, it was a great success and helped me to confront several lingering issues.  But it also reminded me of a peculiar set of memories from my foalhood, ones that I’d long forgotten.

It took place a while before Sweetie Belle was born, back when we’d just moved into Ponyville in late Fall. My room was on the ground floor to the side of the house, and my bed was right against the window. I remember not liking the arrangement at all, me being afraid of the dark and my parent’s room being upstairs.

So for the first few nights, I’d bundle under my blankets in fear until I fell asleep. I liked the new house so it was endurable enough. But on the third, just as I was falling asleep, there was a knock on my window. Clutching the quilt,I hesitantly turned to look and to my surprise, there was a young colt right at my window. I couldn’t make out him out clearly in the dark, but he said he was Tempest, the boy next door.

I wanted to turn the lights on for a better introduction, but he pointed out my parents would notice. He was probably right, parents always seem to have uncanny perception. So we just talked through the window in the dark. Tempest was an odd one, but nice enough. Apparently his skin was very sensitive so he didn’t much like the light, and he was homeschooled. His parents were very cautious of what he was exposed to and didn’t like him going out to play with the other foals.

He felt sheltered and lonely, and I was glad to have made my first friend. And he had the sweetest voice, so soothing.

It was our little secret, talking kid stuff into the night.

But then, things got a little funny. Some weeks in, we were chatting our usual silliness, and I told him I didn’t think I’d be able to get to sleep that night. I just wasn’t very tired. “Open the window,” he said, “You can come out and play with me.” It seemed a friendly suggestion. Of course, being the cultivated filly I was, I told him that was a stupid idea and it’d get me in trouble for sure. Somehow my parents would find out.

He got very angry at that, raising his voice and complaining talking was boring, declaring himself sick of it. Having never seen that side of him before, I was frightened and worried he’d wake somepony up. Shrinking under the blankets, I considered telling him to go home. But he soon calmed down, and stuck around.

So we continued on for a few more days without such incident.

Except after that, he just had it in his head that talking wasn’t enough. We’d be conversing and out of nowhere, Tempest would ask me to open the window. Sometimes he’d give some excuse and other times, he’d just say he wanted to come in and get to know me better. He said we couldn’t be true friends if we hadn’t even been in each other’s houses. Yet even at my age, I knew it wasn’t at all proper to have a young colt in your room past midnight. So I’d always have some flimsy excuse myself to refuse him, sometimes my parents, others I was simply too tired.

While there were no outbursts like the first, I could tell he was getting frustrated at this. But night after night, Tempest would appear at my window. So we continued chatting and getting to know each other better. I learned about his Equestrian history lessons and told him about my days at school. He was so ignorant about the outside world, I felt bad for him.

But the turning point came about what must have been seven weeks into our nightly dialogues. We’d been talking for a particularly lengthy time when he brought up his usual request for entry. However, this time he said it was too cold, he wanted to come in to warm up. And strange enough, that was the first time I considered the snow outside. I realized that for the past month, he’d been standing outside my window in the frigid winter just to talk to me.

That really touched me. Being a little filly, I’d never had a polite boy take that great an interest in me before. And of course, I grew concerned for him out there possibly freezing this whole time. So I finally agreed to let Tempest in. Oh how eager he grew, efforts paying off. But I wouldn’t leave it at that. If I was going to chance letting him in the house, I figured I might as well turn on the light and meet each other properly.

I told him I was turning on the light first, and trotted my way toward it. Then it all went downhill. Tempest began to protest, trying to reason and talk me out of it. All sorts of reasons he gave, speaking fast and voice growing shrill. The light wasn’t good for him, it was too great a risk he said, better to stay in the dark. But it had begun to bother me that I didn’t even know what he looked like, so I insisted.

And right as my hoof touched the light, he shrieked the most unpony noises I’ve ever heard.

And then the light flicked on, and I saw who I’d been talking with for the past two months. A horrifically rotting pony, no hair and head misshapen. Sodden pale skin and despite the screeching, the vilest grin imaginable. Oh, but the worst were the abyssal voids where his eyes were meant. Portals straight to Hell. In that instant, I felt them pierce my soul.

I was rooted in fear for only a moment before screaming my head off and fleeing to mother and father. Between sobs, I managed to tell them of the demon, but of course when they checked my bedroom, there was nothing to be found. Still, I wouldn’t dare go back to that room. And it took only a few nights of me sleeping with them before they gave into my demands to switch rooms.

In a few months we moved to the house the family lives in now and I somehow managed to forget the affair, never seeing him again.

Until I opened that window tonight. Goodbye.