//------------------------------// // September 24 [Sleepless Night] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// September 24 I dozed off a little but I couldn't really fall asleep and finally I got up and put on my flight gear and went outside to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors. It wasn't anybody that I knew on the radio and there was a little bit of confusion but finally I got permission to fly, and I took off and went north. Kalamazoo was all lit up underneath me; all the street lights and house lights and I could see the lights of the cars on the road and blinking lights from airplanes in the sky, too. But off to the north, the lights ended, and then there were just a few scattered lights here and there that were farms. And I could see way off to the north of me a kind of glow on the horizon which I suppose was Grand Rapids. Sometimes the best way to think was to talk things over with your friends, and sometimes the best way was to get away and be by yourself for a little while and so I flew and I concentrated on flying and not thinking about Aric or Meghan, but instead the feel of the air under my wings and the slight bit I was off-balance from my freshly-broken primary. I concentrated on the wind ruffling my coat and the way my tail bounced with each wingbeat and I looked up at the stars above and the lights below and the flashing red lights that warned of towers. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I could make out the shadow-shapes of the ground below me. I was past the dirt mines, past the 131 bus Highway, and over open fields and little woodlots north of town and probably if I'd focused on them I could have figured out exactly where I was but it didn't matter. The thought was in my mind that I could just keep on flying. I could live off the land well enough; there were plenty of grasses and fields with food in them and a farmer probably wouldn't miss a little bit of it. I could get fish from streams and rivers and lakes, and I could find a cloud and make it into a little house and nobody would bother me up there or I could go down on the ground and live with the deer and graze with them. Or I could turn west and if I took a nap and rested on the shore of Lake Michigan I could fly to Chicago and stay with Cayenne, or maybe go east to Lansing but that wouldn't solve anything and Mister Salvatore was clever and he would find me and he would probably be mad. Maybe he'd make me do paperwork. It wasn't a mature thing to do, either. A foal could be excused for trying to fly away from trouble of her own making, but I wasn't a foal and just because I maybe didn't want to have to make a decision didn't mean that I could avoid it. We had to all sit down together and decide what was fair for everyone but I was so afraid that when we did I would lose one of them and I didn't want to. I don't know how long I flew because I never looked at my watch, but it was getting light in the sky when I finally landed back on the boardwalk and my head was drooping and I could barely keep my eyes open and I staggered back up to our room and I took off my radio and my flight vest and my camelback and just left them lying on the floor and I couldn't get my watch off. And I shouldn't have gotten in bed without at least rinsing the sweat off of me but I was too tired, so I climbed into bed next to Meghan and as I put my head down on her chest I thought what if this was the last time that we could ever sleep together, and I cried myself to sleep. I didn't wake back up again until it was well into the day, and I was a little disoriented by that. Meghan was still in bed but she was dressed in day-clothes, and was sitting against the wall, and had her hand resting on my back. My head was in her lap and I didn't remember anything about her getting up or leaving to get her clothes unless she had had them last night and I hadn't noticed. I didn't think she had, though. Peggy was sitting in the papasan chair and said she wondered when I was going to wake up and asked if I wanted to go to breakfast and if I still wanted to go skydiving today. I nodded my head and then closed my eyes again because Meghan had started scratching behind my ears and it felt really good.  I felt better than I had last night, maybe because I’d cleared my mind by flying or maybe because I’d woken up with Meghan. I asked Peggy what time we were going and she said that she'd scheduled us for three but she could try to reschedule if that was too soon and I thought it was plenty of time but then I thought to ask what time it was now and it was already past noon. So that wasn't much time at all and I'd have to hurry. Meghan said that she had to go back to her room and do things but she hadn't wanted to leave before I got up, and then she kissed me on the forehead before she left. And Peggy said that we were really cute together and then when we were at breakfast she asked if I'd been gone all night, and where had I been, because when she got up in the night to use the bathroom I hadn't been there and then when she'd woke up in the morning my flight gear had been scattered all over the floor. And I told her that I'd gone flying to clear my head, and she asked if that was something pegasuses did and I said sometimes. I said that I thought it would be best if me and Meghan and Aric all met together and worked things out between us and she thought that was a good idea and said that we should make sure to choose someplace that was close to campus and also private so that we could have a good, honest talk. Then she said that no matter what happened she would stay by my side, and that I could always tell her anything and that I'd better have one more chocolate eclair because I'd need the energy for today. I felt a lot better when we went back to our room and so while she changed into her adventure clothes I got my portable telephone and was going to send a telegram to Aric but then I saw the one that I had gotten from Mister Salvatore and never read. He said that he couldn't get the tornado team to come to Kalamazoo, but that they were coming to Indianapolis to fly in an airshow and if I wanted we could go down there. So I told Peggy and she came over and read the message too and said that sounded like it would be a fun road trip. She thought that Indianapolis was about six hours away but she wasn't sure. So I sent him a telegram back saying that I wanted to go and some of my friends did too and I didn't know how many but we should probably get a hotel room and after a few minutes he sent me a telegram back and said that he would make the arrangements. Then I couldn't think of who I should invite and maybe it would be smarter to not make a final decision until after me and Aric and Meghan had had our talk. I thought that it would be better to invite each of them personally, so I asked Peggy if she had any suggestions of a good place to meet and she said that Waldo’s might be good because it wasn't too far from campus and it would probably be pretty empty if we met Sunday for lunch, and so I went to tell Meghan and at first she didn't want to but she finally agreed. When I got back Peggy asked if she could borrow my camera or if I wanted to use it, and I didn’t feel like putting on any flight gear so I told her that she could.  My straps wouldn’t fit her, but she said that she could clip it to her parachute harness with one of the clips that came with it, so I found the box it had come in and Peggy got out the clip she needed. Then on our way to Allegan Peggy stopped at Aric's house so I could tell him, too, and he said that he would and I promised that it would just be us three and nobody else. Then I told him that me and Peggy were going skydiving and I kissed him and went back out to Cobalt. We went all the way to Allegan, and she just took the 131 Highway because that was the way her GPS suggested she go. And it gave her directions all the way up to the building where the skydiving airplane lived but it wasn't smart enough to tell us how to get off the main road and get to it, but that was okay because there were signs that said. I was glad that we'd gotten there early because when you skydived for the first time you were supposed to be attached to someone who knew how to do it, but Peggy had done it a bunch of times before so she was allowed to skydive on her own. They had trouble figuring out what to do with me, though, because there weren't any human parachutes that would work on me and I hadn't brought a pony parachute with me. And they weren't sure that their harnesses would fit on me and tie me to another skydiver which I didn't want anyway, but it took a lot of convincing and talking and arguing even though Peggy had already called them and talked to them and thought that they understood that I would just be jumping out of the airplane naked and gliding to the ground with my wings. But they finally agree to let me after I flew around their parking lot and then got on the roof of their building and jumped off and didn't crashland, and Peggy showed them some of the YouTube movie of me fighting a storm to prove that the turbulence from the airplane wouldn't confuse me. And they said I had to talk to the pilot too and reassure him that I wasn't dumb enough to fly into his airplane or any others but that didn't take too long because he recognized me from the airplane radio and shook my hoof and he said that I was probably a better pilot than he was and he was really honored to meet me. I had to sign a paper saying that I knew skydiving was dangerous and that I could fall to the ground and die and if I did it was my own fault, and since I was kind of annoyed by all the questions that they'd been asking me I said that ponies signed things by inking our forehooves and stamping on the paper and they actually managed to find some dark paint and put it on the bottom of my hoof and I stomped on their paper and I could see Peggy was trying not to laugh. There were a bunch of people in the airplane besides us and they had decided that we would go out first, I guess so that if I somehow forgot how to fly I wouldn't hit anyone else on the way down. And Peggy was kind of bothered by that but I said it was okay. The airplane wasn't as nice inside as the Cessna I'd flown in to the airplane factory, and it was noisier, too. You could really hear the sound of the propellers through the metal skin. It was a little unsettling that there weren't any windows I could see through, either, and once it got up in the air I got out on the floor so that I could face forward and that helped. A couple of the other skydivers looked at me and how I had my wings out and I probably did look a little bit silly but I didn't care. We went up and around and it seemed like a really long time before we finally got to where we'd be jumping out. The guide wouldn't open the door until I was back in my seat which I thought was kind of silly since I was about to jump out the back, but I tucked my wings in and hopped back in my seat and then he opened the door and I felt a lot better now that I could see out the back. We were almost a mile higher than I was normally allowed to fly, and I had a little bit of time to admire the view before Peggy went out the back and then I jumped out after her. And I had to dive a little bit to catch up, but she'd stretched herself out flat so that she would fly for longer, and it didn't take me very long to get to her and we fell together, which was a really strange feeling. All the wind noise as we sped up made it impossible to talk, but that was okay. She was looking around at the land stretching off to the horizon. You could almost make out the shoreline (it was hard to be sure it wasn't just a mirage), and you could see Kalamazoo off in the distance and Grand Rapids, too. It seemed like it was too soon that we had to separate so that she could open her parachute and I had to slow myself down, too, which was actually a lot harder for me because I couldn't just pop my wings right open all at once, and so I got a ways below her, but then I could shed some of my airspeed by flying back up to her, and then I circled around her until we got close to the ground and she had to focus on landing. Humans didn't land very gracefully but I guess they don't have all that much practice at it. And then the parachute drifted out behind her and she had to kind of rein it in. There were a couple of helpers on the ground who came out and they helped her get out of her parachute harness and then collected it and bundled it up because there was a special way that you had to put it in the backpack or else it got all tangled. We had to wait until everyone had landed before the van would take us back to the airport, and Peggy said that it had really been an interesting experience to go parachuting with a pegasus, and that she'd been thinking about how this was how I saw the world most of the time and that it kind of helped put things in my perspective. Peggy wanted to go again, and there was enough room on the airplane that we could go one more time, but we had to wait as they packaged the parachutes up again, so we relaxed in their lounge and looked at pictures of skydivers making patterns in the sky. There was also a picture of a couple of people in a strange suit who were making smoke from their hind legs, and she said that was called a wingsuit and it let people sort of glide on their own and I thought that would be lots of fun because then we could spend some more time in the air together. And she said she was willing to try it but wasn't sure if it was possible to rent one or even if you could normally fly them around here. She said that there were people in Colorado who did, though, and they liked flying off cliffs and by mountains and that was called BASE jumping. When they were ready for us, Peggy got her parachute on again and we went back out to the airplane and this time we were allowed to jump last, so we sat in the front and that was a lot better because even in my seat I could see through the windshield and watch the pilots working to make it fly. And I knew what most of their controls did now, too. I wonder if Mark would let me fly his airplane? I was paying attention out the front so it was surprising when the guide opened the back door, and I turned around to see people going out the back, and I could feel how the airplane got lighter as they went. Everyone but me had to move kind of hunched over because the airplane wasn't that tall inside. And then we were at the back and she got her signal and jumped and then it was my turn and I jumped, too, and I could see all the other skydivers below us, just a string of dots stretched out behind the airplane like it had been pooping out people, and I dove down until I was beside Peggy and she reached out and held my hoof and we fell together. There were a few small clouds drifting around that we passed by and it would have really been neat if we could have landed on them but I wasn't sure what would happen to Peggy if she tried to land on a cloud. If I worked it some I think she could have stood on it but I wasn't entirely sure, and that might be something that was better to experiment with close to the ground instead of all the way up in the sky. I had to move away from her so that she could open her parachute and this time since I knew what was going to happen I started my slowdown as I turned clear, and this time we stayed a lot closer. People below us were getting off the field, but there were still a few parachutes stretched out on the ground, and she had to go to the very end of the field to avoid them. There were ropes she could pull to steer her parachute. I came down almost right next to her, and the helpers took off her parachute for her and then we got in the van and went back to the airport. I got a certificate for it being my first time skydiving even though it wasn't my first time at all. But it was still nice of them. When we got back to campus we were a little bit late for dinner, but that was okay. Sean thought it was really funny that I'd gotten a certificate for skydiving and said that Peggy should have gotten one because she was way less experienced than I was. And I'd been thinking that was true and maybe I should give her my certificate but she said it was okay, and it would be something really funny to have back in Equestria because I was probably the only pegasus who had one. Christine said that I was the only pegasus who had a pilot's license, too, but that wasn't true, and so I told her how everypony on the tornado team had one, too, and then how they were going to be in Indianapolis next weekend for an airshow, and Sean looked at Peggy and begged her to go, and she said that we were going, and he said 'thanks Mom,' which was really funny. I said that Mister Salvatore was going to get a room and I bet he was probably going to go and then I thought that I ought to tell Aquamarine and Gusty and Cayenne, too, because we could all meet there. So when we were done with our dinner and got back to our room Peggy said she was going to free the girls and got into her lounging clothes, and I told her that if she really wanted her boobs to be free she wouldn't have put on a shirt. And then I turned on my computer and wrote letters to all of my pony-friends to let them know about the airshow, and I was hoping that they would all want to come. Peggy said that we could leave Friday after class, and she could take the three of us in Cobalt, and I thought that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn might want to go, too, so we could ride with them, and Peggy said that she wasn't sure that anyone really wanted to ride in a van with the feds. I said that they were a lot of fun when you knew them, and I thought I should ask, because more people fit into Sienna, plus Mister Salvatore was really good at getting other cars, too. So I sent him a computer letter, too, just to see. We had some leftover beer from my party and Peggy didn't feel like doing her homework, so we sat on her bed and I told her how nervous I was about tomorrow and she said that no matter what it was going to be better to have the conversation and get everything worked out rather than wind up having some spectacular breakup during mid-terms and I guess that was true. And I thought maybe it was my fault, because I'd spent so much time with Meghan over the summer and almost none with Aric and I could have; he hadn't been all that far away, and I might have just been taking him for granted and assuming that he wouldn't mind at all. Even though he'd said that he didn't, maybe he didn't really mean it. And even now I wasn't spending that much time with him, except for Durak and sex, and so he was probably feeling left out and maybe he thought that I spend every other night with Meghan even though I didn't. Peggy told me I should tell him all those things, because he wouldn't know if I didn't tell him and that was really smart of her. I still wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow, but I was hoping that it would be all right, and I was glad that we’d still gone skydiving because that had let me think about something else.