He almost fell in love with the mailmare when he saw her round the corner and come trotting down the street.
Excitement overflowed in him and seeped into the world. He was smiling, which was rare enough, but the way the world seemed to glow was an entirely unfamiliar experience to him. Everything was brighter, and the scenery of the street, despite being as still as ever, was bursting with life. The trees were alive, the grass was alive, the clouds sailed by as slow as warm honey. The houses across from and beside his, for most of his life, where nothing more than outer shells that contained the shambling masses of some other pony, or this unfamiliar family now inspired glorious scenes of familial harmony and domestic contentment in his mind. He was already smiling even before she turned the corner and he almost fell in love. The world had the right to just as happy as he.
He was waiting for her, so as soon as she appeared on his street, he perked up. His pulse started racing and his heart caught in his throat. Today was the day, he was sure of it. The letter would come today. Just like he was sure yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, he was sure today, his confidence as resolute as ever and unshakable by precedent. He shook his head to clear his mind, but it was a fruitless exercise – he’d gone through these motions every single morning of the past week, and found that banishing these feelings was the definition of futility. He knew he was almost in love with the mailmare, because he’d fallen almost in love with her every single morning. He wasn't angry with her whenever she failed to live up to his expectations, and she would be there for him the next morning, and he would be there for her.
Now, though, that would change, and today was the day. The ephemeral romance was finally at an end, aborted by the interruption of the letter he’d been waiting for. He knew it. Somehow, the way the mare carried herself communicated to him that she had the letter for him. Before, she had skipped his house each time. He didn’t get much mail, anyways. But now, as she moved from house to house, almost as if counting down to his, he knew her hooves would guide her to his door. She was almost skipping down the street, her saddlebag bouncing up and down against her side. She was happy, and she deserved to be.
She halted her progress in front of the gate that sequestered his yard from the outside world. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to let her inside, so he bounded forward from his perch on the porch, and raced to the gate in a flash.
When she saw him rush up, she smiled a wide, innocent grin at him, apparently not noticing his earlier staring and seeing him for the first time. His heart felt like it was going to explode for lack of ability to hold the affection he was wrapped up in for this little mailmare whose name he didn’t know.
“Hey, sir!” she said. Her sound was simple excitement given voice. “Finally got a letter for ya today. This the one you’ve been waiting on all week?” With that, and with no further flourish, she pulled a letter from the saddlebag and held it out for his inspection. There was a simple series of chickenscratch on the alabaster envelope that was so familiar to the stallion that a single cursory glance placed its owner.
“Yes,” he said breathlessly, his eyes looking at the letter, almost falling in love with the type, the way it contained a complex elegance in the disaster of its style.
The letter shook slightly but deliberately in front of him, and he realized that he was holding up this mailmare.
“Well,” she said, still smiling, “here you go. Glad it finally got here for you. Happy to be of service.”
He gently picked it up from her hooves and lifted it up to get a better look. He was too critical not to be skeptical, and his mind immediately went to fantastic schemes of counterfeits, magic illusions, and hyper realistic dreamscapes. No, he had to deliberately remind himself, this is real. I deserve this. I’m good enough.
“Yes,” he repeated back to mailmare. She was gone from his mind, and the street, as he raced back inside and locked the door behind him, letter clenched between his teeth.
The interior of his home was a frightening contrast to the outside world, but he was used to it. Now, it felt like his joy and enthusiasm lit up the room like captive fireflies. Sometimes, in the dark, bleak rooms of his house, he felt like a prisoner – subject to nothing but cruelty and unable to find freedom. The room was dirty, and the blinds drawn tight. Only a sliver of sunlight filtered into the room – the bare requisite to read. There was no need to concern himself with decorum or propriety. It wasn’t as if he lived with anyone important.
Except, now, there was this letter. Something felt wrong, inviting this message into his home while it was in such a state. It injected such a brightness into his life that it felt almost out of place, a sacrosanct item embedded in a home of delinquency and vice.
He stared at it. There was a sense of foreboding that seemed to choke the air out of him. This letter was too much. There was too much riding on its contents – too much of his own future wrapped up in the little scribbles that made up the thin contents. It was too bright. It shined brilliantly and illuminated his life, exposing, with kind and gentle words and superiority that it would not and could not acknowledge, every single crater and flaw of his life. The joy had not left him, but it was tempered now. Fantasy restrained by reality. Hope metered down. Expectation subdued. Disappointment. A defensive mechanism to save him from crashing too hard.
He paced around the table, moving around the dark room while his eyes never left the small white envelope. Like a lion circling his prey, he regarded it suspiciously, as if he suspected it to leap up and flew if he wasn’t ready to cut its escape short.. He almost didn’t want to open it. To let it sit there, on the table, while he could imagine in a delight series of fantasies all the mights and maybes that it could contain.
He fell upon it. With grasping hooves he lunged forward, the dust that covered the otherwise unused table exploding into shimmering crystals in the pale light at the disturbance. He wrenched open the envelope, having finally gathered the courage to exile his fantasies and replace them with truth. Reality was harsh. Subsisting in willful delusion, harsher still. It was unfulfilling, like a candy treat – delicious, but it provided him with no substance. And he always felt bad about it afterwards. He couldn’t help but regret indulging in these fantasies.
He ripped the letter out of its container. It was a single page that he unfolded and held in front of him, his hooves shaking as his eyes darted over the page. The words ran over his eyes without comprehension, at first. He read so fast and so eagerly that he couldn’t understand any of it. It was just symbols that he immediately fell in love with. Shapes and the blackness of ink that contained in them all the truth and everything beautiful about the world. There was no meaning to these words that could possibly surpass what their mere existence meant to him. They could have contained the phrase, “You’re worthless. I hate you.” over and over again but by Celestia if he wouldn’t still feel his heart flutter in delight and affection that someone had taken the time out of their day to tell him that. He was worth that much to someone, at least.
He read it a second time, then again. The words formed into meaning, and a message began to take on a coherent stature in his consciousness.
Hey man,
Sorry this letter took so long to write. Moving is tough stuff, and I’ve been busy. My new place in manehatten is really nice. I’ve been looking around the town and it looks like there’s a lot of places we’d probably like. Nothing like that place in Canterlot, though...Man, I can’t even get over that night. Never thought I’d run into a pony like you in a place like that. Who knew you unicorns could be so flexible, haha.
Anyway, thanks for the letter. I’m glad it found me okay. You’re right, it’s a real shame we haven’t been able to meet up since that night. I’ve been thinking about you alot, and I suppose it’s at least good we can keep in touch like this, huh? I really hope you’re doing okay. If you can get away from work for a while, you should head up here and visit me. There’s lots to do here, and we could just spend a night on the town
or, with each other, you know. Either way sounds cool
write back soon, okay?
Your friend
He blinked at it. His eyes were dry, which surprised him.
He pulled a pile of paper from a nearby drawer, and set it down with a heavy thunk on the table top. A quill and jar of ink took their natural place beside the blank pages.
He read the letter again. He had no plans for the day. He could just lie in bed and read this, all day. It was necessary to ride the flow of delight, and to let fanciful extrapolation carry him to new heights before sensibility set in with it’s damning and infallible concreteness.
This pony. His friend. His only one, he was pretty sure. At least, the only one who he could look back on apply that title too. They’d met just months ago, but already the effect of their association was incapable of being denied.
This pony had thrown his life from its path. His future, at one point, had been set in stone and inexorable. His life was planned. Mediocrity would be his calling card, and he would revel in it. Such was his lot in life – a life so plain and unassuming that no one could ever criticise it, for they weren’t even aware that it existed. His only ambition was to persist. The only destination he had was irrelevancy.
Now, though, this pony had changed him. As rain changes the solid ground into soft mud, so his life became dark and unclear as tears and the flow of emotion rushed over it. Each of these letters, he hoped, would be a guidepost or a sign that would direct him in some way back to his path. He searched them futilely for validation, or for answers as to why his life had previously been found so lacking. Barring that, he beseeched them for a new, tangible direction. You did this to me, he wanted to shout at the immutable pages. You caused this! Now take responsibility, and show me where to go. I’m so lost. He never found that, though. Each time, instead, the letter was a gust of wind. They pushed him further and further out of sight and foresight. The mists grew thicker with each letter. Confusion.
There was nothing malicious, there, though. This pony didn’t intend anything like this. It was accidental corally to his existence. Merely by persisting – by existing, by smiling, by talking, by writing – this pony grew so bright and perfect that he couldn’t help but be awed. The stallion felt burned by the contact, his life on fire. His foundations were cracked and splintered from the heat. Everything was melting, shaping into something new. The coat of plastic that surrounded his life dribbled down around his feet and dried into a grotesque shape. He was horrified at how easy it was to destroy what he was. He felt naked, and scared. He wanted someone to hold him.
Insecurity had flooded him. This pony he had met made him question everything about himself. A pony could look into a mirror and see all their flaws on full display. They could pick and stare and wince as they look at everything about themselves that they hate. This was similar, but opposite; this pony was his mirror. But, in him, he saw everything about himself that he loved. He was the awful, ugly reflection that deserved nothing more that criticism and disdain. He was the parody of a perfect pony, alarming and appalling in comparison.
It hurt to know this pony. It hurt to know somepony so simply skilled that it embarrassed you by single contact. He felt ashamed to be praised, and grew resentful to be complimented. After all, when this pony existed, what compliments could be left for him? It had to be patronization. He didn’t deserve anything else.
It hurt, too much. There was no denying that. A pegasus who wants to take in the glory of the sun would fly too close to it, and her wings would be burnt for it. She did it nonetheless. Even though this pony burned him, marked him, damaged him, his touch and adoration caustic simply by the levels of perfection that separated them from one another, even with all that, the only thing he wanted to do was inch closer. He let this pony burn him. He wanted to be pulled into a hug and feel his flesh being cauterized and branded. What the fire does not destroy, it reshapes.
He wanted to be aflame.
Being hurt felt better than being cold.
Two dark pale stones could not see the beauty of the world. He would rather have his eyes shimmer with red and gold plumes as they reflected the bonfire that engulfed his life.
The ink had begun to pool on the top of the first page as it dripped from the quill onto the sheet. It looked ugly, just like everything he created, so he threw it away and put a new sheet of paper in front of him.
The message began in sputters and starts, jerking forward unnaturally as he attempted to express himself to this pony. It was an effigy of proper sentiment, his inability to craft what he wanted making everything seem forced, over-wrought, distant, clinical. He didn’t know what he felt, which made it harder to write. It hurt him to know that he was so lost that even the barest of his emotions could not translate into a coherent sentence. He wanted to write What have you done to me? onto the page, and beg this pony for answers, but he knew that none would come. This pony was oblivious to the damage this association had effortlessly caused. This dismantling of his life came as a surprise.
By the second paragraph, he had found a rhythm. Slowly, the words picked up pace. He thought of the next one before he finished the current one, finally. Then he was two ahead. Then a sentence. At the end of the first page, he fell from his cliff of posturing and projecting and fell and fell, unable to catch himself against the cliff-face of his ego for fear that he would smash against it and shatter. He wrote as he fell, leaning in closer and closer as ink dashed black fissures haphazardly across the endless sea of white.
He moved in a flurry, his quill blazing new paths and identities across the white pages. Momentum carried him now. He seemed to move faster and faster with each word, the dissembling and self-consciousness having finally fallen away and his heart was starting to pour his dialog onto the page, as natural and clear as a spring creek. Without direct cogency, he transitioned from topic to topic, paragraph to paragraph. Ink splattered against his snout whenever he dipped his quill back into the vial and wrenched it back to the page as quickly as he could. He couldn’t stop for even a second. If he stumbled, he would be lost.
One page became two, three, then he lost count, the thoughts he felt the need to elucidate never ending. If he had a form of organizational structure to this message, it was only an accidental one – topics seemed to blend into each other, his quill moving of its own volition, grinding its message against the page out of necessity rather than out of willful action. Sentences were the building block of meaning, and he had so many things that meant so much to him that he just had to share it all. He wrote and he wrote, crafting realities with his quill and solidifying fantasies, piercing deep holes into his fears and anxieties by the sheer conceit of his words. He rose higher on this cloud he had made himself, floating above everything – above Equestria, above life, above time and the stars. From here, he could see everything. There was nothing about his life or this existence that could hide from him or his quill. The credit lie entirely with this pony who he had met, and who had burned away his fear. He had made him seek and realize understanding. He lit up the world, and beckoned him to see where the light would take him. The impetus of this entire letter, every observation from here on out, would belong solely to this pony. The rest of his life would be nothing more than an extended love letter.
Words had always held a special power over him. He was a pony who was more apt to be hurt by a particularly biting rejoinder than by a physical blow. He placed more value in a heartfelt confession or admission of affection than he did in any corporeal act of passion. He could feel the warmth of other pony’s touch through their words. He felt their hearts beating in the flow and rhythm of their sentences. He could feel the tempered gazes and avoidances whenever words were neglected to be said. These letters lined up and formed his medium, his operational capacity for understanding others lying solely in his ability to see the words in front of his as something other than an the sum of their parts.
Now, though, words took on an almost transcendental quality. These weren’t just some bizarre assemble of symbols, he realized, as he flipped the next completed page over and greedily pulled another in front of him. They had something behind them – some value that wasn’t there to be seen. Individual words, sentences, even ideas fell away in his flurry of composition. This message was revolutionary, a form of expression just as much as a deep, endless smile or holding someone close. It blurred the line between prose, between poetry, between essay. This letter wasn’t just thought given physical form – it was MEANING transcribed onto the page, shaped and crafted by language into something that anypony would read it and immediately understand.
The words scratched on the on the paper for an eternity. The sound was violently loud. It was like music to his ears; it was a symphony that accompanies his epiphany. He felt a communion with the great pony scholars of old, laying out incidental wisdom in complete haste, deconstructing mysteries to the rhythm of a scribbling quill. He had no greater motive or conceit than the discovery of himself and others.
He lined up Existence in his sights, aimed his quill, and with great intent, fired. He pierced her clean through, and here she was, spilling her secrets onto his page like blood–splatter.
The letter was wrapping up. He was riding the throes of passion, and felt it ebbing. Exhaustion overcame him. He had guided an avalanche from his mind through his body as deftly as he was able, gently prodding it here or poking it there or pushing it this way or that. It fell through his quill and crashed all over the pages, and he felt exhausted and disheveled for the effort. Satisfaction. Contentment. Emptiness.
He leaned back in, dark marks specked across his face. He was panting. The ink hadn’t dried yet, so he made sure to be careful. There was a certain element of wild distress about his handwriting, indicative of a frustrated and despairing stallion who bashed his hooves against solid rock until they were bloody stumps that couldn’t hope to create anything beautiful or nuanced. He knew that wasn’t the case, though. His words had power. He was good enough.
He paused for a second, then lifted the quill again. It rested against the bottom of the last page of his extended letter. He thought, for the first time since the quill began to move. Dont’! he shouted at himself, in terror. His own subconscious realized the dangers of active cognition. It was so close to achieving sublimity, and a critical examination would only serve to recognize the improbability of the sights he was seeing, and of the heights he was soaring. Don’t think! Just write! It was too late, though. The warning went unheeded and the danger already upon him. Thoughts contained everything he hated about himself. Thinking led to questions. Questions led to answers, which were constantly found lacking.
He thought. And he wrote. One more sentence, the first that that was deliberately crafted since he had begun. It was first where each individual word felt heavy, and a it was a burden to lift the quill to the the next letter.
I love you.
He stared at the three words. There was something indelible about seeing it written down. Here it was, plain and clear. He had stabbed himself in the heart with his quill, and by Celestia it hurt more than anything had ever hurt before. But the blood was a clearer and more pure ink than the dark black that composed the page, and it had scribbled this message onto the page.
He couldn’t stop staring at those three words. He felt a pain, suddenly. A surge of anxiety of fear of being judged that he thought he had left behind when crafting his messages for this pony. A fear of being a fraud. A fear of who he was, and whether he had any interest in putting that on display for anyone.
Every part of him was compelling him against this. He had just met this pony months ago, surely something like love could not exist, yet? Every sense of propriety and tact that he had gathered and accumulated from watching other ponies fall and picking up the pieces after them was lining itself up as ammunition against this sentiment. He’d always been a reasonable and intelligent pony, up until he met this stranger, and his critical mind found no end of arguments as to why he didn’t and couldn’t feel exactly the way he thought he felt.
Suddenly, the magic fell away. The cloud of intense verbiage and rhetoric he’d been soaring on became nothing more than a dark collection of solid symbols and he fell through them, bashing his body as he went. The words suddenly seemed so blocky, so indiscreet and simplistic. This wasn’t meaning heated by the fires of passion into something beautiful. This was something importune and inadequate, born of a lifetime of personal issues and needs and wants that had been bludgeoned and browbeat into something digestible. It was supported with a rickety structure of ostensible profoundness, and giving the slant and impression of containing some value, but now, looking at those final three words, he knew it was just vanity and misunderstanding posturing at being real.
I love you.
He couldn’t take his eyes off of those words. They were so definite, so fallible and so eagerly deconstructed by the nature of their meaning – both universal, and unknowable. It was easy to tear them apart, and he knew that there was no possible way he could demonstrate their validity. There were no proofs for this – no experiments to be done, no order of operations that he had to maneuver his hypothesis through to reach the eventual conclusion. No matter how many words he weaved, he felt there was nothing he could do to prove the veracity of his feelings to anyone.
The words could not be used as he intended to use them. They did not translate his meaning. If taken at face value, they risked oversimplification. They risked being taken as superficial. If the thought was extended deeper, it began to approach tergiversation. It was too suspicious a sentiment to be anything other than specious. The words were offensive on every possible level; leaving no room to construct them as wholesome and positive. A phrase as solid and whole as this invited misunderstanding. It brought to surface the always present fears of ulterior motives.
Those three words contained a heavy weight to them, and chained him to the earth. There was a particular danger in them. Not only did they presume to sum up, in a few syllable, the nuances of a relationship, but the ponies of antiquity he had felt connected to a while ago now had their eyes narrowed in suspicion, or were already shaking their heads disapprovingly. The extent of a being’s value is wholly in its connection with others. Those words were too heavy, and he struggled to lift them up and show them to everyone. He could think of no way to make it easier – no way to convince the world that his emotions were worthy to use such a term.
And how could he, whenever even he was unsure if what he felt was the truth, an educated and logical confluence of emotions? He didn’t blame their skepticism, nor hold it against them. They were a possible lie. A blemish on his affections.
It felt true to him.
But what did thatmatter?
No matter how much you shout about wanting something, it doesn’t put you any closer to getting it. That was a lesson he’d learned many times throughout his life, but he hadn’t discovered an alternative. He hoped, if he just desired and wished enough, that reality would bend itself to his whims. The future, he prayed, could be mutated by the sheer force of his coveting. Maybe it could. Maybe his problem is that he didn’t know what he was coveting.
He was a confused lost pony with no understanding of how other ponies formed their emotions, or their reactions to them. He felt tiny and insignificant, unable to deduce the complexities of the world. Even his own mind was a complete mystery to him, a haze of feelings that left him questioning his sanity. He didn’t know why it came to the conclusions that it did. He didn’t know how to figure out whether he was right or not. The only tool he possessed to examine himself was irrevocably flawed and damaged.
“Dammit,” he said, his voice throaty. His eyes were cloudy, and the words in front of him dissolved to a indiscernible black mess. The curse had come because some of the moisture had run down his cheek onto the page below him. It dripped onto the paper, disturbing the still-wet ink. It dropped down onto those final three words, intermingling with them, and destroying them. They were a mess now. Sentiment blurred.
He tried to wipe away the tears from the page, delicately attempting to remove the mess from the words and allow that cold, hard sentence to stand on its own. It was impossible. His hoof came away spotted with ink, and all that remained on the page was a smear of darkness.
Why couldn’t the thinking have waited? Why could not have the dark, choking tendrils of logic taken but another day to bind him to place, and suffocate these errant emotions. If only the cloud he had built himself had kept him from their reach a while longer! If only he could have stayed afloat until the next day, when he would have shoved the jumbled letter into the mailpony’s hooves, only to come back into the house, and then be able to regret and think – to say, with his limbs trembling, ‘By Celestia...what have I done?’.
“Dammit,” he said, again. He pushed the pile of papers away from him, and decided that it was time to begin again. A second attempt was necessary. The first was flawed and risky. It showed too much. It risked more than he would allow.
Hey
It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I’ve been thinking about you lately, but I’ve been busy with work so I didn’t even notice the wait. Just glad you wrote back.
I’ve never been to a city the size of Manehatten. You’re right. It’d be rad to go out there for a while. I’ll see if I can take some time off of my schedule to come out and visit you. I’ve been working on something new but it’s slow going. I’d like to show you some time, if you’re interested. I’m still a bit awed by your last project that you sent me. If that gets done, make sure you ship a copy my way. I’d love to see the finished version.
He thought for a second, then scribbled three more words.
I miss you.
He folded the single page into fours without looking it over again. Almost as if his mind was compelling his body to act before he could catch up with himself, a envelope flew from a nearby drawer and the folder paper into it. He set that aside. The mailmare would be back tomorrow morning, and he would wait for her just as he had every day of the last week.
The sun had set, and he lit a weak lamp to keep at least an operational level of illumination. He looked at the stack of papers in front of him, crumpled with use and the distressful, frantic nature of his composition. An entire day’s work.
With a sigh that had the weight of a lifetime behind it, he stood, pulled open a drawer, and dropped the stack into it. There, they landed on and mixed with hundreds of other sheets of paper, all covered in the same handwriting. He stared at them, a distant resentment making him feel uncomfortable as he looked at the hours and hours of writing that he kept smuggled away.
A life unheard. Everyone who matters is lending a sympathetic ear, but there’s nothing he can tell. The truth is too dangerous, to himself and to anything he cares about. So much ink expended on things that will have no life outside his mind, trapped by his own fear and insecurity.
I really should get around to burning those, he thought. He had the same thought the week before, but it was harder to acknowledge that.
He was still exhausted. He had planned nothing for the rest of the night, and, now, it was even more difficult to consider scrounging up the energy to find something to do. His tired hooves guided him back to his room. He felt like crying, but it was some feeling in the back of his head. Something distant, borne of some unthinkable and unsolvable frustration that compelled ponies, or, at least, ponies as weak as him, to just give up and cry. In physicality, he was now calm, his eyes only misting over here and there. He was able to blink that away, and pretend it never happened.
His room was dark, apathy manifesting itself as a bachelor-like mess. He stumbled over to an aging record player and turned it on. The calming, familiar tunes of one of his favorite albums filled the room. They tried to fill his mind – he wanted them to – but his mind had ossified to an ugly, miserable stone.
His bed was too big, but he climbed into anyway. The music had already begun to annoy him, but he didn’t have the strength to climb out of bed and turn it off. He tried to affect some form of companionship by bundling up the heavy blanket of his bed and holding it close, but, unsatisfactorily unlike a real lover, it didn’t try to soothe or comfort him when his lip began quivering and his eyes were clenched tight to avoid the inevitable catharsis.
He was pretty sure he was still in love with everything, just as he was when that pretty mailmare rounded the corner with a message from his friend.
He loved everything.
But who knew what that meant?
He hoped that, on the other side of Equestria, his friend was eagerly spending his day waiting for his own mailmare to deliver his message.
The fantasy was cut short when he interrupted himself.
Probably not.
He stared at the empty ceiling, and wondered whether he was being reshaped or destroyed.
