A Few Lies Later

(this didn't feel like a chapter proper but might end up one eventually. just getting it out so I can actually try to sleep myself )

The memories always returned. AJ didn't figure that was ever gonna go away. How could you forget family?

And yet, how could you survive remembering they were gone?

Some nights, though, she could stop herself. "It's just bad luck," and she lets herself stop.

Not tonight.

They wouldn't want you to drown in guilt, sis. Mac wasn't wrong there.

Applejack sighed and rolled over. Tomorrow was her birthday -- she'd be the age that read high enough that she didn't like thinking about it at all -- and she already knew AB had a 'surprise' this year.

She's every bit of her parents.

AB had finally gotten old enough to actually surprise AJ now and then, too, so who knew? It might be something that wasn't a cake this time.

She had grown. She didn't remember Wine and Cort, but they'd have been so damn proud.

We're Apples. Even with a pile of manure on us, we keep coming up and we don't stop growing. It was that story about Winesap and Cort's worst date that made that saying an Apple Family Saying, the one Granny always told even though she's told it a hundred times.

AJ had asked Mac how to live with it. He said he didn't rightly know, but he knew he needed to sleep. So he did.

He said he'd done some more crying in private, but he couldn't sleep either sometimes. Until a yawn or two creaked out, and he remembered: Guilt eats you. Sleep saves you.

More thoughts circled in the thin light of the stars and moon, too easy to get lost in, too complex to be solved in a mare's lifetime.

You gotta sleep sometime, sis.

AJ closed her eyes and hoped she wouldn't open them again until the sun shone into her room.

Perhaps she'd see the bright stars of the night out dreaming she was camping on the cliff again, or the lake she'd visited so often as a filly, when the days seemed endless and the flowers rustled next to her in the breeze.

Maybe she could just remember them, until sleep came to save her tonight.

They were pretty memories to think of.