Raven Night School

by Impossible Numbers

My Life's Bad

OK, I’m back again. No problem. I’m fine.

Cool. No problem.

But yeah.

Now that I think about it, is it really a surprise? About my dreams being weird, I mean. Life’s weird.

Like that thing I read in the newspaper yesterday morning. I always get the newspaper. Dunno why. It just makes me even gloomier. Self-torment or what? Yet such is the life of an artist.

You must have seen it too. That article about the Crystal Empire? Cursed by an evil king. Locked in the frozen north for a thousand years. Reborn under the cleansing wash of the aurora borealis.

Sweet. That is, like, totally radical.

Oh, you haven’t seen it yet. Right. It said a bit of his red horn survived – the evil king’s, I mean – and he came back and tried to take over again. That’s, like, the stuff of horror tales. Necromancers that never die. I so wish they got his picture.

And you look at this stuff. And you think: Royal Guard time, right? Everyone’s gonna die, or get sucked into this black world with red skies and unnatural purple flames burning in torches. You’d think ponies in the street would be like, “Oh my gosh, this is it, this is the end of the world.” Flipping out.

And I read the paper, and it happens all the time. There was this Summer Sun Celebration that went on a bit too long. Nightmare Moon – cool name, huh? – came back, they said. Then this chaos spirit turned everything into a blue chessboard. Then we got those changelings hitting the streets hard enough to leave craters. Vines taking over the walls. This crazy bull-monkey dude sucking everyone’s magic out of their faces.

And you end up thinking, well, what next? The universe is throwing all this stuff at us. We’re kicking it back, but we gotta miss sooner or later. Law of Probability. Or was it Statistics?

Everyone’s just so chill about it, though. It’s like in Las Pegasus when those guys get a jackpot at one of those arcade machines. They’re thinking they’ll just keep getting jackpots. Then they run out of bits. Then security has to drag them out the double doors ‘cause they’re shaking the machines.

No one remembers the hundreds of guys who get dragged out. They just look at the one guy with money piling up at his hooves.

I tried telling this to Sunshine Smiles this morning. Coffee break, I think. She didn’t get it. “Well, it hasn’t happened so far, so we should be OK.” That’s honest-to-Celestia what she said. I didn’t say anything back. I don’t much. But sometimes I wanna kick her.

Yeah, I know. It’s not nice. It’s just how I feel. I don’t care what you think.

I write down the list of things to do every day before bed. I did it yesterday. OK, this morning. Really early this morning. The point is: before bed.

Get coffee at eleven.

Get new glass slippers.

Find old anthology.

Go to literature club.

Find out if model-drawing’s any great shakes. I try something different now and again.

But who cares, really? Life is but a soap bubble on the cruel sea. One flick of a splash later, pop.

Well, picture it. One moment, you’re walking down Canterlot’s main avenue under the ivory towers. Worrying over what dress to wear. Who you’re supposed to talk to at the party. Making sure you don’t forget the tickets. Wondering why your life's a shell of your fillyhood fantasies.

Next thing, pop.

Dream life’s history. White Canterlot turns into a pile of black spikes. You’re wearing rags. Someone’s put an iron stock around your neck. You can’t talk in case the guards take you away. And you don’t dare forget to dig the mines or fetch the mind-control armour for wartime, ‘cause then you disappear faster. Like, they-don’t-bother-taking-you-away faster.

That’s why I write that to-do list every night before bed. Even last night. I have enough trouble thinking tomorrow’s gonna come. I don’t want to spend my last night worrying over trifles. Not if I won’t be around long enough to do them.

Maybe you can’t tell much from the one time I had that dream. Law of Statistics again. Sorry. Gotta think about all the times. See if anything stands out.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m the idle rich type. Got no real job. Unless you count poetry. I send my pieces to the magazines and the local and national contests, like the Canterlot Sonnet Season Challenge. Sometimes win prize money. Sometimes don’t. Not that I need it. I even get my bathroom soap on a silver platter.

It’s just a metaphor. Don’t overthink it.

Yeah, easy-peasy life. It drags.

I know what you’re thinking. Nothing to do but sit around all day. Waste money on jewels and hats. Never say anything wrong. Keep the Canterlot ponies from giving me funny looks. Write poetry when it’s all too much. Don’t embarrass the family. The works.

Yeah, but it’s not like I’m good at anything else. And Mother and Father would never get off my back if I did anything less than the noble arts. Science. Full-time painting. Politics. Fashion. Couture. But I just like writing. Anyone can write these days. It’s not like the Classical era. You had to be a baron at least before you could even learn the ABC back then. Nowadays, hicksville ponies can slap together a few pages and that’s it. Not much privilege in writing now.

The only time I actually really like is sleep time. Even then, only so long as I don’t have bad dreams.

Like the one month a few moons back. Wintertime, it was. I never got a decent night’s sleep. Always waking up halfway through and having to sit and watch the full moon for ages. There was this theory I read in a magazine once. How there’s this natural time everyone wakes up halfway through the night. Can’t remember why. Kept them from getting cold, or something?

So at first, I just shrugged and thought it was that. Never happened before. I was a late bloomer, maybe? Whatever. Got more reading time out of it. Went through the whole Power Ponies series that month. It was OK except for the Humdrum arc. That one was insanely boring. And totally didn’t get the continuity. At all. I threw it out with the garbage as soon as I finished it.

Didn't matter what I tried. It kept taking longer to get back to sleep. I started on ten, twenty minutes. After that, it went to two hours. Worst one was when I didn’t go back to sleep at all. Felt like someone had stolen my brain for the rest of that day.

That dream didn’t help. I started thinking the midnight waking was a punishment. Dream about turning ponies into stone or dimming the sun just because you can. Get hit by karma the second it stops.

Anyway, it stopped after a while; I did jigsaws and stuff until it died down. Father bought me loads of them way back, with pictures of famous buildings on them. Canterlot Castle. Pony of Liberty's Statue in Manehattan. The Great Fence of Yakyakistan. Dozens. I finished them all that month.

The goggles didn’t work. Now I think about it, I’m not sure they ever did.

Well, yeah. I tried all that stuff. You wanna change the world, change yourself. Blah blah blah.

I said I tried it. Don’t give me that look.

Oh, all right. Go ahead. Give me that look. I probably deserve it. But I really did try.

Like way back, when I was at the academy. First tests were coming up. I crammed like crazy, every night with the firefly jars on my pillow. Everyone did it. I wasn’t the only one up at nights with lights. Moondancer was the best one: she just lit her horn. Advanced stuff for a kid. And she read stacks of library reference books when the rest of us were falling asleep on the first textbook. Show-off.

I would’ve given anything to run away. Didn’t care about any of the other lessons, but Literature Studies spoke to me. I memorized all the Odes of Peat Bog the Pastoralist. I could quote Death’s Head Hawk Moth. Even the bit everyone forgets about the candle and the spiral stars. I stayed up writing and reading the Commander Hurricane speeches and the epic poetry. My energies lined up perfectly. My temptation after dark. My soul’s calling.

I flunked the test.

Exam hall was exactly like the classroom. Tidy little room. Tidy little desks, all in tidy little rows and columns. Miss Thistlecroup marching down the aisle like some drill sergeant, barking the rules. I almost fainted when they slapped down the paper.

They wanted all this analysis stuff. I didn’t get it. It’s like chopping up a dress to see what makes it look good. Or like picking pigments off a Daily Saviour surrealist painting. The one with all the melting ponies. You don’t just do that. It’s wrong.

I almost, almost passed. I nailed the metaphor and allegory sections. I got a merit for the creative writing bit. But they want you to explain stuff like the structuralist this and post-society that. They want you to explain how it creates feeling. I don’t have a clue. It just does.

Well, if you spend bedtime after bedtime beating your head against the book, and that happens, what then? Go back and do it again? Tried it. Still flunked it. It just didn’t click. Not like it did for Moondancer. I must’ve been born stupid, or something.

Not that I care. I mean, I’m gonna die anyway, sooner or later. What’s the point struggling for it first? What a waste of the flickering flame, to try and fan it to death. No way. I’m totally chill. If no wind blows in, it can’t go out.

That’s life. Unbearably bleak. Can’t do much about it, except don’t make it worse. Everyone should know that. Be a totally better life, then.

I’m not weird. I’ve just seen the light. Or the darkness. I’ve seen something. I shake hooves with my shadow.

Whatever. Not like it matters. Reality is as reality does. Not nice. And then it's over. So get what you can.

What?

Sorry. You want me to do what?

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