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I hear peace. You don’t think you could hear something like that, but I do. The birds are singing quietly, the bugs gently humming in the distance, and a soft breeze moves through my hair.

Reluctantly, I open my eyes. It’s the field. The world is exactly as I left it. But it’s not as I left it. Because I never left.

I pull the gun from my head and look at it. The small interface on the side tells me that it as a bullet chambered and that the safety’s off. Everything’s all ready.

I jam the barrel back into my skull and pull the trigger again. Nothing. I move it around my head to try and approach it from a different angle, but it’s the same result. Nothing.

“Great,” I mutter to myself. It’s jammed. I pull back to try and get the bullet out of the chamber, but it’s stuck as well. I keep yanking at it with increasing ferocity, but it just won’t budge. With each pull, my face grows redder and hot tears start flowing from my eyes. When I’ve had it with the god damn stubborn thing, I toss it angrily. It hits a rock and, just my luck, it fires into the middle of nothing.

“Of course!” I yell at it. I get up and walk to the rock. “Nothing I ever fucking try fucking works!” I grab the gun and throw it off into the distance. I never want to see that piece of shit again. The one day I decide to use it, it brings me nothing but bad things.

I turn my attention to the little rock in the ground it landed on. In blind fury, I start kicking it as hard as I can. “Why?” I yell at it. “WhywhywhywhywhywhywhyWHY?”

I fall onto the ground and start bawling into my hands. “Why did I ever come here?” I whimper between sobs.

I just sit in the middle of a field crying for god knows how long. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. But eventually, someone comes up behind me.

“Are you okay?” a familiar, soft-spoken voice asks.

I whip around and see Fluttershy looking at me with a look of concern. I’m not even sure how to react to her coming. Every part of me wants to break down and tell her everything, but the blind fury in me wants to just reach out with my two hands and just snap her neck. And the worst part is, I know I could do it. Just break her neck and walk away, pretend like nothing ever happened.

Thankfully, the better part of me wins. I breathe a heavy sigh and turn fully to her. “What do you want?” I snap at her. Well, I guess being an asshole to someone who doesn’t deserve it is better than killing them.

“I, umm, oh..." I can see that she’s nervous, so I pat the ground next to me. She sits down.

“Let’s start with why you were out here,” I say.

“Oh, I heard there was a hurt bunny out here, so I came to find him. Why were you here? Were you sending something to Earth?”

“Not really.”

“Well then, why were you out here? There’s nothing else besides the portal here.”

“I just…I don’t know.” I'm not even sure that I'm lying anymore.

“Oh, well,” she looks away, “You looked like you were sad, so I came over here, but…I’m not sure if I can help.”

That’s it. As soon as she finished speaking, my body filled with pure happiness. I don’t know how I know this, but all my life I was searching for that one sentence. I throw my arms around her and bring her into a big hug. “Thank you!” I cry into her mane.

“I, huh?” She clearly doesn’t know what’s happening. And frankly, neither do I.

“You said you couldn’t help!” I exclaim.

“Is that a good thing?”

“I…” I pull out of the hug and just smile at the sky. “It’s wonderful. You can help me by not helping me.”

She just stares blankly into the distance for a moment, then turns her head to me. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do I,” I admit. “But that’s just so much better for me. If I went to Twilight or anyone else, they’d just try to ‘fix’ my problems without really understanding them first. They act like they understand, but they don’t. I know they’re just trying to help, but that doesn’t help at all.” I take a deep breath to calm myself. “If you’re willing, could you just sit here a moment and just listen? Don’t give me any advice or anything, just listen. I don’t need help, I need someone to understand.”

“Well sure! You can tell me anything.”

“I’m just…at a loss for words. Coming to Equestria has just been so much for me. I just want to go home. But I can’t. Only five of us came, and no one else can come in. But one's dead, one’s far away, and two we still don’t know where they are. I guess…it's too much to handle, and today...”

“Killing that changeling just pushed you to your limits?” she finishes my thought for me.

“Yeah. So I came out here, and-“ I cut myself off. “Can you keep a secret?”

“A secret?” she echoes.

“Yes. A terrible, deep secret you can’t ever tell anyone, anypony, anydragon, whatever. The only two things in the universe that can know about this are you and me. Twilight can’t know, Applejack can’t know, nobody. If someone starts torturing you to get this secret, you can’t tell them. Can you hold a secret like that?”

“Is it that bad?” she asks, terrified.

“No,” I admit. “I doubt anyone’s going to start torturing you just to learn this. But you can’t tell another soul, understand?”

“I…I guess,” she says.

“No guessing. You need to be committed to keeping this a secret, hear me?”

“I’ll keep the secret for you.”

I slowly breathe in and out a few times to prepare myself for this. “After I ran away from the picnic, I went to my house. I took my gun and came out here. Then, I tried to kill myself.”

I don’t know what pure shock sounds like, but I’m pretty sure it’s close to the indescribable whimpering Fluttershy’s making. “You…what?” she yells.

“I attempted suicide.” Now that I say it, it sounds so…hollow, almost. Instead of anger, I’m just feeling regret. How could I be so stupid? “But I’m glad it didn’t work.” I put my arm around her shoulder and hug her. “Thanks for listening.”

“Is that what the loud bang was? Did you use the same thing you hurt the changeling with?"

"Yeah, a gun. Something went wrong with it, but I don't know what. It didn't want to fire."

"Magic?" she suggests.

I can't tell if she's being serious or not. Either way, I sort of want to laugh at her. But if she is serious, I'd probably hurt her feelings. "Fluttershy, guns don't work on magic. At least, not the ones I've seen. Sure, I couldn't explain how half the high-tech ones they make fire, but the one I have doesn't work like that."

"No, maybe it stopped you!"

"Like, being close to the portal affected the mechanics somehow?"

"Not like that, like..." she looks into the distance. "I don't really know what I'm talking about, you'd have to ask Twilight. She's so much smarter than I am."

"Come on," I encourage her. "You can at least try. You knew enough to think it would be logical for magic to interfere."

"I...I don't know. I could explain it to somepony who's lived here their whole lives, but to an outsider..."

"What makes it hard to explain to me?"

She is clearly thinking my question over really hard. "The more you live here, the more you'll see that...not only unicorns have magic. It's everywhere. And it affects our lives in strange ways we've all grown used to."

"Like?"

"Gosh, it's...so common, I've stopped noticing it." She ponders my question a little longer. "Well, the first time we went to the Grand Galloping Gala, we all sang before we went into it."

"And?"

"Everypony started singing with us! And they were singing the same thing together, at the same time. They all knew the words, and nopony had planned it."

"So magic...causes spontaneous singing?"

"A lot more, but we all just get so used to it that I can’t think of anything else!”

“And you’re thinking somehow it was magic that stopped me?”

She nods her head. “You’d have to ask Twilight if you want to learn more, she’s so much smarter than me about all this…”

I reach my arm out and hug her. “If it’s any consolation, you know infinitely more about magic than I do.”

She blushes a tiny bit. “Oh, thank you.”

“If anyone should be thanking anyone, I should be thanking you.” I pull her a bit closer. “I just needed someone to listen, a shoulder to lean on, a friend I can bitch and whine to. I’ve never really had someone that close to me.”

“It’s what friends do for each other,” she says happily.

I guess I have a friend now. Possibly the only true one I’ve ever had. I’d be kidding myself if I said things were going to be good from now on, but at least now I’m not alone.