The Bjorn Identity

“Happiness is, a warm muffin.”

Ditzy Doo

After resting up for a bit on Ditzy’s couch, she and I thought it would be a good idea to grab something to eat, and since I had managed to forget to eat at all, to which I earned a strongly worded lecture from Ditzy on eating properly, I jumped at the idea of going into town to find a meal.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said as we walked from her house.

“I hope it wasn’t about anything bad,” I told her.

“Of course, it wasn’t about bad things.” She slapped at my leg playfully with her wing, and grinned. “I was thinking that maybe we could try a few things to get your memory back.”

Here it comes. I hadn’t quite decided to tell her that I was beginning to chicken out about getting my memory back, and I was sure she would have been upset if I had mentioned this to her, so I kept it to myself.

So instead of telling her I was a big fat coward, and took the liars path. “What kind of things?”

“I was thinking, maybe we could try scaring you, like how when a pony gets the hiccups and you give them a good scare, and the hiccups go away; well maybe that could work for you.” She was looking at me very serious, and I know she wasn’t expecting it, but I burst out laughing as hard as I could.

“You don’t think it’s a good idea do you?” she said, looking embarrassed by the idea suddenly. “I knew it was a stupid idea.”

“It’s not that,” I told her, reaching over and patting her on the shoulder. “It’s just that I have absolutely no idea about hiccups, and for some reason, the word hiccup sounded hilarious. And that whatever it is, it requires someone to scare them to make them go away.

I was still giggling a little, and when Ditzy realized that I wasn’t mocking her idea, she found my take on the description as equally funny, and began to smile, then laugh, covering her mouth with the back of her hoof.

Suddenly, I stopped walking and took my hand and reached over and pulled her hoof away from her mouth. I can’t really say why I did it, but that it bothered me.

“Why do you do that?” I said, shocking her with the act. “You shouldn’t hide your smile.”

Looking at me with confusion, and a number of emotions that I couldn’t name at the time, she regarded me like I was new to her world, and didn’t understand some deep meaningful truth about her.

“But, I look stupid when I laugh like that,” she said, blinking a few times, waiting for me to grasp the truth that she had just laid out for me.

I couldn’t help but feel my heart breaking at the idea, surely she didn’t think that she was stupid when she laughed, it was cruel thinking, it was horrible, and I dropped to my knees, and wrapped my arms around her.

“Why would you think that?”

“Everyone knows it,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know it. I don’t think you look stupid, I think your smile is amazing.” I was squeezing her tightly. “I think you look beautiful when you smile.”

“Do... do you really mean it?” she asked, bringing her hooves up and wrapping them around me. “Do you really think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you are an angel.”

All at once, Ditzy jumped up and down, and squealed as loud as she could, throwing herself against me, and knocking me to the ground backward, and began to kiss me on my face. “Oh, thank you, thank you Bjorn, I love you!”

Instantly aware of what she did, Ditzy got a horrified look on her face, and slowly removed herself from over me, and looked down at the ground. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but I know what I heard, and she knew what she said.

Did it bother me, that she said it? Not in the least. The truth was, I was very fond of Ditzy, I enjoyed the sound of her voice, and I enjoyed being around her. Her silliness was a breath of fresh air, in the cobweb collecting mush of my brain, and I wanted her to be happy. Maybe I didn’t know a lot of things, and maybe it was a little too soon for words like love and beautiful. But I was a man on borrowed time. I felt it, and I could also feel the haze in my head lifting every moment. Things were becoming clearer, and clearer.

Say something dammit. I was kicking myself in the ass, but all I could do was lay on my back, and look up at her. She hadn’t moved in all the time I had been mulling over my thoughts, and I could see that there were tears in her eyes.

“Hey, are you alright?” I asked her, reaching a hand out to her.

“Bjorn,” she said, looking at me, small streams of tears trailing from the corners of her eyes, and down her face. “I love you.”

Before my hand could touch her, she went tense, and sprang forward leaping past me, and running away as fast as she could.

“Aww shit!” I yelled, as I jumped from the ground. I knew good and well that I shouldn’t have waited so long before I responded, and it served me right. She probably thought I was revolted or something by the idea.

Running after her as fast as I could, I had no idea where I was going or where she had gone. For all I knew, she flew off and was halfway to Abu Dhabi, though I wasn’t exactly sure where that was; and for some reason, I had a mental image of a fat orange cat endlessly attempting to mail another cat there.

As I ran, the strangest sensation came over me, and it seemed that I had only recently did something similar, and while I focused on it, I heard voices shouting, and sounds of loud booming noises.

When I looked down, I was wearing the same clothes that I had when I was pulled from the water, and I was holding the black metal object. It was called a gun, and I held it out, as I rushed up a set of metal steps.

”Security’s been breached!”

There was a face in front of me, and he was speaking in another language, but I understood him clearly. What was I said again, as I rushed past him? This place is going to hell, we have to abort!

Abort what?

More noise, and I was facing a group of armed men, shouting at me, and one of them brought their gun up at me. . .

When I finally stopped running, I was standing in the middle of town, by a large water fountain. My head was clear, and my breathing was heavy, though not as much as it should have been. What ever life I lead before, I was definitely in good physical shape.

Sitting on the other side of the fountain, sniffling, was Ditzy. She was struggling to look at her reflection in the water, and I rushed up to her.

“There you are,” I said, as I sat down next to her. “You sure can move fast.”

Ditzy didn’t look up at me. Her body language was quite clear that she was in turmoil, and I felt a pang of sadness at the thought that I was somehow responsible for it.

Reaching my hand over and touching her on her hoof, I leaned over to her. “Ditzy, I want to tell you something.”

She didn’t move, she kept staring at the water, and continued to sniff. “You don’t like me.”

“Of course I like you, what sort of thing is that to say?” I scooted closer to her, and brought her hoof up to my face, and pressed it against my cheek. It was warm and soft, like fine cotton, and velvet. “Ditzy, you are beautiful, and funny, and very important to me. But I’m messed up right now.” I gave my head a few raps with my knuckles.

“I know the words, but I don’t understand what they mean. But if wanting you to be near me, and wanting to be near you, and liking you, and thinking you’re beautiful and an angel that saved me, and lights up the darkest corners of the world; well, if that means love, then I do, I love you.” Her hoof smelled like flowers, and I pressed it to my lips. “But I want to be sure, I want to understand the words, I’m close, I know I am, and having you with me helps me so much, you don’t realize.”

Slowly looking up at me, Ditzy’s eyes were pools of emotion, tears, and moonlight reflection. “Oh, Bjorn, no pony has ever said those things to me!” She hugged me fiercely, and cried in joy. “I just knew the moment I found you, that you were special; a gift, sent to me from the heavens!”

Pulling her up from my embrace, I looked in her eyes. Those golden honey pools of misdirected amazement, and she leaned in and kissed me on my lips. I felt warmth spread through me all the way to my spine, and I brought my hand back behind her head, and stroked her mane, as she lingered there for just a moment.

Before either of us could speak, my stomach rumbled and growled. I gave her a frown, and suggested that we get that meal before I attempted to eat my own leg.

That night, Ditzy slept in the bed curled against me. It was strange, but after only a few days, I felt as if I had known her for years. We were old and withered, and happy with each other’s presence, happy with the same company, and the same looks, the same touch.

As I laid there, I reflected on the memory I had uncovered from when I was running after her. I had more reservations about learning too much, but now, something told me that if I didn’t, then whatever hopes I had of any sort of relationship with my beautiful gray mare, was going to be greatly hindered by a lack of knowing myself.

Stroking her mane, I fell asleep listening to her soft snoring, and breathing noises. A sound that I would grow to love over the course of the next few months.

~   ~   ~

The next several days, I showed great improvement. My ability to recall more and more basic knowledge was improving, though anything about myself, and events were still a complete blank canvas.

No longer was I at a loss for what things were, or how they operated, I could recall general information, and information relative to a task, but everything about myself, where I came from, and what sort of things I did were steeped in such a shroud of confusion and mystery, that I often wondered if there were a way to retrieve them from my pad-locked brain.

Of course, this is where Twilight Sparkle came in. The resident scientist, geek, and all-around nerd of the town; she had ideas about helping me to get my memory back, and since the incident with my temporary memory several nights back, I was all too eager to be her experimental guinea pig.

The first of several experiments involved sitting me in a chair, and strapping me down, with Twilight cranking up a electronic machine that was designed to stimulate brain waves by injecting them with very small currents of electricity. It seemed like the right thing at the time.

“Is every-pony ready?” she said with a big grin of excitement on her face. I could tell she was in her element, and yet there was something strangely troubling about the fact, that I was about to get electricity fed directly into my brain.

“Uh, are we really sure about this?” I tried to give her the best worried expression I could manage, but unfortunately for me, Twilight was in full fledged discovery mode, and simply brought a pair of goggles down over her eyes.

“Here we go!”

Flipping the switch, I can only imagine the light show she must have received, but from where I was sitting, it wasn’t just a mild jolt. In fact, the force of the electrical current ripped me from the chair, and threw me back against the wall, where I collapsed with a groan, and smoking fingernails.

I opened my mouth to say something, but only gurgles came out at first, followed by a string of insults in Russian, then French, and finally I started going on about sailing, someplace called the Andes, and tropical fish.

“Well that was a bust,” she said, coming over and helping me up. “I thought for sure, that a jolt of that kind would be just what you needed.”

It was a good thing that Ditzy wasn’t here for this, she’d be pissed, and whenever she got pissed, I started laughing, because her expression when angry was hilarious, which only made her more angry.

“Maybe we should try something that doesn’t involve me getting capital punishment,” I said.

It was the start of a long week, and by the time it was over, I experienced; being subjected to freezing conditions; closed in a room, and frosted with magical ice abilities; subjected to heat, while cooked in a steam-room with not one but three fires; waterboarded by Big Macintosh, in an experiment designed to recreate the conditions of the environment I was in, at the time of my amnesia, and then lastly, scared out of my wits by Ditzy, while on the toilet, to see if her hiccup theory would jog my memory.

All in all, it was productive. I learned that when motivated in just the right way, ponies in Ponyville were relentless in their pursuits, and if one were the object of that pursuit, then God have mercy on their soul.