22 years old.
She was driving through the desert, the endless stretch of mountains and sagebrush out to the horizon of rural Nevada, on her way to a customer location to repair a computer.
That's right, three years of working at the same job since briefly becoming a pony, and things were... oddly the same. Well, Erica had a company van, instead of using her own car. She made one dollar an hour more, despite being a "senior field engineer" and every once in a while she....
Every once in a while I thought about dying my hair pink, but I never did.
The things that really changed weren't related to my job. I still typed out stories while I drove, and I still had a figurine hanging from my rearview mirror, Gilda standing ironic vigil over my vehicle. But my body had changed, and so had my heart.
I still gave to people when I could, of course, but it was more than that. I no longer tried to contemplate the why or how of myself and others. I didn't try to puzzle out the damage. That was the biggest casualty of my transformation, the cynicism and ego needed to look at myself or others and say "I just need to understand you, and I can fix you."
And, as life tends to do when you let it flow around you freely, I began to understand myself and others so much more once I stopped trying to force that understanding to happen.
The nature of humanity? I still agree with what I said to Fluttershy in that hotel room. Change. We want and need change, even if we don't understand it. But the nature of humanity touches on some key points outside of that. We are, and forever will be, a vast community of siblings. Of creatures more alike than not.
Organized religion may scare me, but the individual people, I can now feel kindness for. If their hearts are open to the concepts of a god looking over them, caring for them in a world where they have been left bereft so often before, I can't fault them for embracing it. I can understand that, I can be kind to them. Even a priest, a man of god, I can sit side by side with him and appreciate the beauty of the world, holding my heart firm as it stands open and caring, without compromising myself or demanding an impossible concession from him.
The man who Fluttershy and I beat with the element of kindness, that scared miserable man who was now in jail for kidnapping (among other things) thought that he was fighting off an alien invasion. How many movies have we watched, where defending earth was so pure and good that it could excuse murder? I can understand him, even if I am sorrowful for the choices he's made.
So, three years on from being a pony, and my life is better, but also I still have a long way to go. I'm lucky that I can go visit Equestria once a month, it's a lot of fun and I get to become a pony for a bit! When I go through the portal, I'm an earth pony. A particularly clumsy earth pony who has basically no magic, but... I feel this deep connection to others, just like when I'm a human.
I think we're going to be okay, and so I go on, humming down the highway across the desert.