I made a mistake.
I lost her. I lose my dream because she pursued her own.
I let her achieve what she had always wanted, and in the process I lost her.
Where did I make my mistake? "Did" isn't a good choice to say. I still make that mistake every day.
I was always with her, laughing, smiling, watching, but I never did enough.
So now, even as I write this out, I can only blame myself.
Rainbow Dash is gone, and so is any chance I had at having her. She's off to fulfill her dream, travel Equestria and to be a Wonderbolt. And I missed my final chance to be with her. I should have told her to stay, told her that quitting was right, because it meant I would be with her.
But I didn't. I didn't because that's not the pony I am. Besides, she's the Element of Loyalty.
Tearing her away from her dreams is the most disloyal thing I could have done.
And now she's out there, training, no doubt going on to be the captain of the Wonderbolts. Soaring through the skies, showing off her skills for all of the ponies who care to go see.
And she'll forget me. The unicorn that chased after her for nearly a year.
I can't write anymore. It's late, and I need to go sleep.
I have to sleep alone. Like I have my entire life.
She came back the other day. It took me by surprise, along with most of the others. She seemed shifty, though, like she was hiding something. So, I singled her out after Pinkie's obligatory party to talk to her. She told me she had passed with flying colors (I presume that she hadn't noticed the pun) and that she would've been an official Wonderbolt.
I asked her why she had come back, and why she wasn't with her team.
She didn't answer me.
Something happened, I'm sure. Why else would she be back? I'm not going to depress myself with the idea that she came back for me, because that can't be it.
Whatever I feel for her, no matter how elated I am that she's back, I need to sort this out.
Yesterday, I was greeted by an unusual visitor. I was drafting up plans for how to figure out what was wrong with Dash, when the mare herself came to the door. My heart jumped, and my mind filled with thoughts that, when I look back on them, I have to cringe at the sheer desperation contained in them.
No matter my doubts, the pegasus was there, and she asked to come in. That confused me, since she had always been fine with barging in and distracting me before, though of late I had come to relish those moments. So I let her in. She seemed distracted, looking everywhere but at me as she entered the room before speaking up.
She asked me if I had some book or another, and I helped her to find it. She spent a while reading, and here I have to comment on how slowly she reads. Yes, I have to admit I didn't get much more planning done, but that was due to the fact that I had her in the room with me, and my thoughts drifted, along with my eyes.
As for her, she had no such distraction, I'm sure, yet she still had barely gotten through at most ten or twenty pages of the book in three or four hours. I felt something was wrong, so I asked her about it. She told me she was thinking.
Rainbow hardly ever does that, so what had driven her back from the Wonderbolt Academy had to have dug deep. All the more motivation for me to keep my plans going. I was finally getting somewhere when Dash said she had to go.
She didn't even take her book with her. At the very least, I could plan again without her there, and I got much more done the next few hours. Tomorrow I'll finish it and get everything organized.
I finished the first phase of investigation this afternoon. I waited until I was sure Dash was resting on a cloud, and I sneaked into her house. Even now, I can remember that my heart was pounding. I had never thought I'd be able to visit her home, and though my time was limited by the length of my cloud walking spell, it was still very nearly a dream come true.
Fortunately, walking on clouds doesn't make much noise, and I was able to move relatively freely. It took me no more than half an hour to search her house for clues until I found the first one.
I couldn't find anything Wonderbolt-related. Even the bed sheets she always bragged about were missing. So, I started looking for those things specifically.
I never found any other Wonderbolt paraphernalia, but I did find something else. A letter, addressed to the library. It was a week or so old, and was sealed tightly. Once I had it, I resisted the urge to open it there and then. My heart was pounding again.
Why was there a letter there? I can look to the side now and spot the unopened note, resting on the table next to this entry. I plan on opening it once I'm done writing this.
Then, I was nearly sure it was something about me and my affection for the mare, or even a hint at the possibility of her returning the feelings. I was in heaven for a few brief moments, before I heard the noise of wings flapping.
I cut out my cloud-walking spell, letting myself fall partway to the ground before flashing myself the rest of the way there with a teleport. I hoofed my way back here, the letter clutched to my chest with my magic.
I need to know what's in it. It's mine, after all. At least, I'm close to certain it's mine. Why would she send a letter to Spike?
I'm reading it now, before she finds out who took it.
I can't believe what I read in there. I have it next to me, opened, ready to be re-read for the third or fourth time now. It was a confession. She missed us. I assume us, since it only ever identified the reader as 'you.'
It wasn't a formal letter, but it got across what it needed to get across. She was going to pass, and then she was going to leave. She didn't want to be a Wonderbolt if it meant that she'd hardly ever be able to see us.
So, she came back. Tried to push past it, and it worked with everypony but me.
With this letter, I don't need to work on the rest of the plan. I scrapped it.
Before I read it, I had hoped that it would be special, something specifically for me, but instead it's an unsent letter of her proving herself as the Element of Loyalty. To her friends, and not to a dream.
This is why I love her. Or, at least, part of why.
I need to rest. I can't do that when writing this.
She came over again. She seemed really happy at the door, ears perked, and there was this glint in her eye that I couldn't quite place. Well, at first she did. She asked about the letter, and with a mental cringe I told her I hadn't seen a letter anytime soon.
She seemed to deflate at that. I felt bad, and I couldn't stand to see the mare stand at my doorstep unhappy, so I invited her in for lunch, even if it was a few hours past noon.
She didn't bother questioning me about that, and so she came in and ate with me. I don't remember what we had. All I remember is that we talked and laughed, and for a moment I believed that we had a chance, that all I had to do was say three simple words and we could be together.
But then lunch was over and she was gone. Reality came crashing down on me and I spent the next hour or two in my bedroom, staring out the window.
She's out of my league, as Rarity would say if I told her how I felt. I don't have a chance with her, and I never will.
I need to stop writing about it.
She's different. I couldn't quite tell how before, but now I know.
She's nervous. It must be about her decision of jumping away from the chance to be in the Wonderbolts. Again.
It really showed a couple of days ago, when she came over to visit, disrupting an experiment I was running. She was rather apologetic about that, even if her sorry's were a bit rushed.
She was fidgeting a bit as she helped me clean up, trying to cover for something , I think, until she finally asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her somewhere, and mess around together for the rest of the day.
I don't know why it took her so long to ask something as simple as that, and I told her that after I was finished with the experiment, I'd be happy to.
Of course I was happy to. I was overjoyed at the fact that she was there, even if she had sent me back in terms of progress. Going out and having lunch with her was a dream come true for me.
Just not the entire dream.
So, tomorrow I'm going to go out to eat lunch with her. Among other things, I hope. I thought of doing up my mane, making myself look nice, but I decided against it. Dash isn't the mushy type, and she'd make fun of it faster than she would compliment it.
I certainly hope I can entertain her the entire day. I don't want to leave her disappointed in her friend.
Wish me luck. I guess you can't, since you're a journal I started up to keep me from worrying over my friends, but still.
I need somepony to back me up, even if they aren't a pony. Or even animate.
Not that it's a date. It's just me and her hanging out. We already do that a lot.
It's what friends do, though I wish it was so much more with us.
I can't explain to you exactly what happened yesterday, but I can tell you this.
I'm a success. Even with all of my shortcomings, my absolute inability to read another pony's feelings, I'm a success.
How? The impossible happened.
After I finished writing yesterday, I left to meet Dash by her house. As always, she looked stunning without doing anything but existing, and she looked happier than I had ever seen her before. In fact, she was giddy enough to walk right with me, hardly ever flying.
She was close, close enough to set my heart racing, but not so close we were touching. I wish we had been.
We talked on the way, with our usual banter. After a few minutes, I had calmed down, caught up in my own pleasure of simply interacting with the pegasus that I forgot about the distance between us for a while, though it stayed in the back of my mind.
She led us to a restaurant that I can now say for certain is my absolute favorite one in town, if only for the cook's ability to create the most divine Traditional Canterlot Salad I have ever had since moving into Ponyville. There are other reasons, of course, but before those even revealed themselves the salad had locked the restaurant's location in my mind.
The entire time we were eating Dash was delighted, if a bit nervous looking. She kept fidgeting, and every time I took a glance in her direction she looked away quickly, though I did manage to catch her gaze a few times. Every time I did, she didn't look away until I had to out of embarrassment, and my own desire to be with her.
Finally, our noontime meal was over, and we made our way to who knows where. We ended up chasing each other on a hill, me with my magic and her with her wings.
The part where we caught each other was the best. Contact with her, even if it didn't mean anything to her, was the world to me.
We calmed down after a few hours and chatted, me about studies and Dash about whatever came to her head, though she avoided certain topics, usually the deeper, more feeling oriented material.
I didn't notice it when it got late. I was too consumed in the conversation with Rainbow that it wasn't until I caught sight of Luna's moon that I realized how much time we had spent talking.
We were together for a while, after I grew silent. No matter how much time I spent looking over at her, I couldn't miss a perfect night to stargaze. Eventually, she asked me if I had enjoyed my day.
I told her it was one of the best days I had ever had in my life. She seemed surprised by that, but I told her that I meant what I said.
And that's how I succeeded. Looking at her under the stars, she seemed perfect.
She looked like a blue angel, with her wings tucked to her sides, though that made no difference to me. Her eyes were fixated on my face, and against my every instinct, I had to put it out there. So I spoke.
I told her that every time we got together, I was happy. Not just content, or just not bored, but happy. I got a satisfaction, a completeness, out of it that was more than from any book I had ever read.
I said more, but I could never remember what it was. But when my feelings overtook my logic enough for me to say what had been bubbling at the back of my throat for a year, I wasn't the one who said it.
She was.
The silence afterwards was one of the best things I have ever heard. All I wanted then was to be with her, and she had just told me that she wanted the same.
The glint that was in her eyes a few days before now made sense to me. My gaze held onto those eyes, and that gaze lingered into my slumber with the mare that said the three words I never could.
When morning came, I found myself wrapped in her cyan wings, and pressed against a pony as beautiful as the sky.
All because I had succeeded once, and made up for my constant mistake.
Author's Note
Hey all! No pre-readers on this one, since this is a spur-of-the-moment thing, though I'm sure that's quite obvious.
I was thinking about Wonderbolt Academy, and it still has not been explained canonically why she came back to Ponyville if she was going to pass.
So, I wrote this, to help freshen my mind up for the next chapter of A Single Spark, as well as to help vent out some of the ideas that are swimming around in my mind.. This was all written in one day, and although I did have my wisdom teeth removed earlier that day, I think I like what I've put down.
Hopefully that applies to you all as well.
I normally don't like it when there's already the feelings there, I really love the build-up of the whole relationship, from friendship to romance, but still, it really is beautiful to see two come together.
This is also sorta kinda practice for when their feelings do start emerging, so hopefully I played them out well, though that is a bit hard with the one-sided letter format I used in this.
In any case, enjoy this short little break from A Single Spark!
[EDIT]: Hey! This is a super belated update. I was just looking over this story and decided to make some changes to it, just some grammer/spelling fixes, nothing major. Not like I'm switching out Rainbow for Applejack or something silly like that. So for those of you who just re-read this two-and-a-half year old story for some reason, that's why you might have an inkling that something's changed with it. Cheers!
