The theft of a lifetime

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Twilight wanted to read an old book, but ends up chasing a white pony looking creature, ending up into the home of a stallion who ends up having written an amazing amount of stories, so much that they cover the walls of his home.

As it may be obvious there, the story is mostly about how things end up. And also about books, but that part is mostly there to please Twilight.

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Octavia_Melody

Octavia_Melody #1 · Dec 23rd, 2013 · · ·

Cool story, but I had trouble making sense of it. Was Silly Hop a ghost, or a representation of something?

TwiwnB

TwiwnB #2 · Dec 23rd, 2013 · 1 · ·

Sorry I made it so cryptic. Happy to hear you could enjoy it on the first degree nonetheless.

To answer with as a simple answer as I can, Silly Hop represents the silly hopes we have about life (that are silly because usually just illusions that vanish with death) / the silly hopes life gives us (that are silly because they look trivial but are quite miraculous).

The whole story is basically Silly Hop that is dead before he could finish what he considered his life work (he never wrote the last words of his story). When Twilight discovers the book, a part of him (the wisest part) sees the help needed to put an end to the whole thing. Twilight is given all the knowledges she needs to understand what is going on and is finally brought back to the book to finish Silly Hop's work and give him back the illusion of accomplishment he needed to rest in peace. (a basic structure for ghost stories)

The whole thing is supposed to be a reflexion on the relation we have with life, what we expect from it, what we should expect, what we can expect, and, ultimately, our relation to death (in a very simplisitic manner). Silly Hop died before he could accomplish anything. That's a tragedy, but a common tragedy. Young people die all the time all around the world. So that's when the first lifetime was stolen, the most important one. Not only to him, but to his relatives who also lost a part of themselves and tried to compensate with the flowers.
Then Silly Hop died a second time, as a ghost, when having to face the fact that the meaning of his life, which was everything he thought he had accomplished and took pride in, was nothing but an illusion he had built. This represents the way we can use our lifetime to build an illusion with the threat of having the whole illusion be taken from us and the whole lifetime rendered useless.

Twilight, the white ghost and the flower are three elements that are here to bring some hopes in the whole concept.
- Twilight, beside being a vessel for the reader in the story, represents the help that we receive when we least expect it and in the manner we expect the least. She is the little something that guaranties everything will be fine in the end.
- the white ghost represents the "wise" (or not so wise, depending on the point of view) part of Silly Hop, the part that knows he is dead and should accept his death. (and subsequently the part of us that tells us we are alive because we are, nothing more and nothing less)
- the flower represents love. I could have written the story without it, as it only brought warmth and light to Silly Hop, which the story could have made without, but it's important in that love is kind of the thing that makes life beautiful. So even if he ignored it, Silly Hop always had something that made his life and his afterlife great. Not sure if love brings hope or if love is hope though...

Actually, to be honest, I'm not sure about any of the concept I presented in this story. I just wanted to say that we shouldn't be obsessed about the idea of "accomplishment" because most of us will never be recognized as genius or great men, or such. Even more, small accomplishment are usually mocked (stamp collection for example, or building stuff with matches).

I just wanted to say that life is a frustrating thing where nothing never really happens (like waiting in a parc watching the grass grow) and that will one day end in a whisper, but that life is also a very great and miraculous thing once we have learned to deal with the most darker aspect of it (mostly death and despair).
Quite generic I guess... and I may very well be wrong about all that. In fact, it sounds kind of stupid as I'm writing the explanation... But for the better or for the worst, and in a nutshell, it was pretty much what I had in mind when writing it.

Please excuse the long answer, I imagine the first paragraph would have been more than sufficient.

makemake