//------------------------------//
// x = π / 2 
// Story: y = sin ( x - π ) 
// by aricene 
//------------------------------//

There are times when I don’t know what makes this worth it.
Ms. Bits waits until I’m almost done with my shift to call me into the back office. I’m exhausted after eight and a half hours of standing (minus a half-hour lunch, but somehow I never got my breaks… again), but I have enough energy to keep wearing a smile while I pull myself back there. The eighth hour of smiling is easier than the fourth. All the muscles in my face have frozen in place.
That smile doesn’t last past Ms. Bit’s first question, though. She asks, “Do you want to continue working here?”
Maybe it’s something in the tone of her voice, but this already feels like a prelude to firing me. It turns out those muscles in my face aren’t so frozen after all. “Wh—what? Of course I do. I love working here, and I do kind of need this job—”
The first part of that sentence isn’t true—with all apologies to the Mrs. and Mr. Cakes of the world, but food service is not my calling—but the second part definitely is. I’m barely making rent as it is. I’ve been in worse financial holes before, so I’m not living in a state of constant panic like I used to, but the ground underneath me is still shaky.
Coral Bits’s back office is only a little larger than a closet. The Sushi Shack, like most of the restaurants in the mall’s food court, doesn’t have much space to work with. One of the three fluorescent lights overhead is out. Ms. Bits’s filing cabinets are jarred open and poorly organized. One thing she should have had the space for, though, is another seat. The only chair in the room is the one behind her desk. Anyone she calls back is left to stand, and I doubt this is an accident.
Ms. Bits places her elbows on her desk. “I haven’t been feeling that you’ve been as enthusiastic about work as you used to be.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I swallow. “Even before I started working here, this was my favorite restaurant in the mall. I love serving sushi, and everything else we make, and— and seeing so many people every day—”
“There have been reviews on our app that mention you,” Ms. Bits says. “And, watching you, I don’t know that I disagree with them.”
I struggle to keep my voice level. “Reviews?”
“Two said that you got their order wrong,” she tells me. “Another said you weren’t smiling when you took their order.” She sets her phone on the desk and taps it.
“Who the f—” I stop myself just in time, and pull my wits back to regroup. After a moment, I say, “That’s just a handful of people.”
“I’ve watched you take orders. I think I agree. You’re not as enthusiastic about this as you used to be.”
It’s exhausting, staying on my feet as long as I do. And I never got either of the fifteen-minute breaks I’m legally required to get. My feet are still aching.
“We’re always supposed to be smiling, Sunset. It’s in the ads.”
I can’t argue with her on that point. I think I was always smiling. My face certainly hurts like it. But maybe I slipped, sometime when I wasn't paying attention.
“I make it a point of pride to get every order correct,” I say, and I can’t keep my lip from trembling because that much, at least, is true.
Ms. Bits narrows her eyes, a little bit. I swallow.
This is not exactly a screaming fight, but my heart is beating like it is. Ms. Bits has seen dozens of high school summer workers come and go. (Hundreds, maybe. I have no idea how long she’s been here.) Fired a good number of them. Her reputation with some of the others, the kids who’ve been on more summers, is that she doesn’t care about us. Never listens to us, and treats us like she treats the drink machines.
For some reason, I had thought, until now, that these were exaggerations. She’s not even making an effort to see things like I might, or to help me. Three reviews on our stupid app, and she’s made up her mind.
“I’ve seen kids on the way out too many times before. They stop caring, usually a few weeks before school starts again. I can’t have that here.”
“I do care. And I need this job.” This is the only job I know how to get that didn’t look too closely at my citizenship paperwork.
“Make an effort to do better,” she tells me. “But I’ll be honest. I’ll be surprised if I see that you’re still here in a few weeks.”
I can’t meet her eyes. My chin is trembling. The only thing I can do is back out of her office when she inclines her head to the door.
I would like to say it’s a surprise that I would spent the evening feeling awful, but I've been feeling under attack for months now. I just wasn’t expecting a blow from this angle.
It started with getting scholarship applications back. Then college applications. Rejections, all of them. To say I was shocked would have like saying that Princess Twilight can really put away her hayburgers—a true statement that nonetheless fails to capture the horror of the sight. At least that was true to begin with. With each form letter, the shock wore down a little bit more, and a little bit more, until all that was left was a pit in my stomach.
That, I suppose, is a kind of acceptance. But I still don’t understand. I’m a smart cookie. No false modesty here. I was Princess Celestia’s personal pupil. Even on this side of the portal, my grades are great, and my extracurriculars—and I’m saying this in all seriousness—are worth killing for. Fencing, animal shelter volunteer, math tutor? Come on.
To get back nothing... it’s like crashing into a brick wall. It keeps knocking the wind out of me. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
My first, second, and now third plans have all fallen through. I have no idea what I’m going to do next or how. Every time I think about it, I just get tired. Some of those rejection letters are still sitting on my desk. I have no idea what to do with them.
Someday, I’ll make a new plan. Some day that isn’t today. 
Or tomorrow, most likely.
It’s been like that for months now.
Twilight is working at an electronics store this summer. The uniform doesn’t really work on her, but the tech support duties are enough like solving a puzzle that she can be happy there. At least, she told me, she could if it weren’t for the customers. I spot her as I walk past. She’s caught in the middle of a conversation with a customer, a real Harshwhinney-type, and looks like she wants nothing more than to escape. She sees me, and smiles thinly. I smile back, just as thinly.
I’m close to charging in to save her from the conversation, and stop myself just in time. The last time that happened, Twilight’s manager yelled at me, and then yelled at her for paying attention to her friends rather than the customers.
It’s all right. If I went in, I’d have to talk to her before I go. I don’t know what I could tell her, or anybody. Nothing I could say would help.
Every time I talk about my problems, I feel worse about them. And so I don’t talk.

*

There are times when I can’t be honest with myself, about myself.
There are pieces of myself that I can pick up and parcel away. I’m good about not thinking much about the future while I’m at work.
Another thing I locked away: the way I reacted when Twilight told me she got into Starswirl University, and her first-choice astrophysics program. She applied way early, of course. Having obsessively researched programs since about the age of twelve, she knew exactly what she was going for. She got it. And I was happy for her. You have to believe me when I say that. I was happy. But…
But.
It wouldn’t be another month until I got my own rejection from Starswirl, but my first few unexpected rejections had already come in, and I had a deep pit growing in my stomach about the rest. That was the evening my denial broke.
That night, alone in my apartment, was the first time I cried over all the letters that had been stacking up. 
The other girls were, of course, having (courtesy of Pinkie Pie Industries) having an impromptu party for Twilight at the coffee shop. That evening was the groundbreaking for all of the plans they’d have to make soon: how they would all stay in touch after going to different schools, where they thought they’d get in. Right before I left, Fluttershy chose that moment to announce she’d been accepted into Canter U’s veterinary program months ago and hadn’t wanted to bother anybody by saying so, and then Pinkie Pie just about exploded, and—
And I had to get out of there. I had a good excuse: my endometriosis was flaring up again. I got lots of sympathy from the other girls, and some extra ibuprofen from Rarity, but I think Twilight knew what else was going through my mind. Maybe it was something I said, some way I acted around her, because her eyes seemed shadowed whenever I looked at her. Both at that party and for days afterwards. Sometimes they still do.
The endometriosis cramps were like glass shards grinding in my belly, and gave me a good reason to be crying that night anyway. But I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew what I was crying for, even if the feelings were too complicated to put into words.
Even with so much distance between then and now, I still don’t have those words. 
It isn’t certainly isn’t jealousy. It’s— a fear of being left behind. Of helplessness. Hopelessness. The anxiety you get when you’re a ten-minute walk from a bus that’s due to leave in five minutes. It’s the last bus of the evening, and it’s all your fault that you’re slow but at the same time you’re going as fast as you can and don’t know how to go any faster, and everybody is staring at you as you dash by because you look like a goon when you run, and—
It’s like that. Except without adrenaline to mix in with all the other bad brain chemicals, and stretched out for months.
“Desperation” is maybe the closest single word. What I’m desperate for, though—I don’t know. An escape, maybe. Escape from all the problems I wrap around myself wherever I go. Escape from myself.

*

There are times when I just don’t belong in my body.
The human range of vision is tremendously narrower than a pony’s. It was one of the most uncomfortable things about crossing over. The first few weeks I was here, I felt like I was wearing blinders. Or like everything was zoomed in. It took my brain too long to adjust. I’m still not sure it’s entirely there.
In Dr. Meadowbrook’s biology class, I read that, if a person is given glasses that turn their sight upside-down, their brain will adjust. In just a few weeks, they’ll begin seeing everything as “normal” again.
There was no word on whether this holds true for equine brains. Of course, I can’t ask. Even Twilight Sparkle, polymath that she is, isn’t a doctor. (Rather, she told me that she’d have to cut open my brain to start to find out, and we both passed on that.)
There are moments when, no matter how long I’ve been here or how many months it’s been since I last stepped through the portal to Equestria, my brain freezes. I forget how to operate my body. The higher pressure the situation, the more likely I am to falter.
One week and six days after I pass my driver's license test, I’m coming home from picking up extra hours at the Sushi Shack. I've been trying to prove myself to Ms. Bits, and the license has added a lot of flexibility to my schedule.
My only car is a thirdhand old van, a gas-guzzler that was owned by Treehugger before she sold it to Sandalwood, who sold it to me for seven hundred bits and my help composing a song. It smells about as you’d expect given that history, but I don’t care. It can get me places.
But staying out late means driving in the dark. I’ve never driven solo this late. The buses stop running after 9:30, and I was only able to pick up those extra hours because I have the license.
I have to take a left turn across two lanes of traffic that, in daytime, would have been packed. Under the streetlamps, everything just looks deserted and desolate. 
I must think I have more peripheral vision than I do. I’m halfway into the first lane before I catch the headlights in the side of my vision. Even now, I could save things. Those headlights are coming down the next lane over. My foot is poised above the brake.
In that flash of panic, my body becomes alien again. I try to move my front hoof— my arm— and tangle up all my signals to my limbs—
I don’t remember hitting my head on my door in the crash. Just a flash of light, and the world turning frost-white as my windshield shattered into a thousand glass beads.
It feels as if that one instant lasted hours, and all the hours afterward last seconds. I barely remember them. The van is a total loss. I know that from the moment I stumble outside, see the front left quadrant of the hood caved in. Next thing I know, I’m standing under orange streetlights, arguing with the lady I hit. Then I’m holding my head in my hands, trying not to show how I felt. Trying to keep from showing weakness. Brushing away tears when I’m not facing her.
For some reason, I’m terrified of admitting fault, though the accident is my fault and I know it. The shock drives an icy wedge between the part of me that knows what I’m being like, and the part of me that just acts. The part of me that was there, unchanged, since I’d come through the portal all those years ago.
I must be acting like my head had been jarred unscrewed. The responding police officer takes me to an urgent care clinic without asking. The nurses there don’t do much but keep me under observation for two hours. Eventually, I insist I can get a Ryde home. (The cost of the Ryde alone eats up all the wages and tips from those extra hours.)
I don’t have health insurance. My car insurance is barebones by financial necessity, and I know it won’t cover this. I can’t even think about that. I just have to get home. Have to get to bed, where I can at least try to sleep in the four hours I have left before my next shift.
When I try to sleep, all I can do is stare at the afterimages. The shock of the impact, bright behind my eyes. The windshield turning an opaque white. The urgent care’s fluorescent lights above my bed. The dash lights of the Ryde driver as he stared into the yawning gulf of his own night making ends meet. 
And all those images are underlined by the feeling, strongest at the moment of the crash but present ever after, that this body isn’t mine. That I don’t belong in it. Or here at all. And that I'm fooling myself otherwise.
I’m an idiot to have ever expected to sleep. And it’s a good thing I can’t, because I forget, until it’s almost too late, that I only have three hours to sleep. I need to factor catching the bus back in.

*

There are times when I know I don’t deserve the friends I have.
I can’t tell them what had happened. I can’t tell them that the van was totaled. We all work at the same mall this summer, and so I can’t avoid them, either.
The next time I see any of them—Rainbow Dash at the shoe store, and then Applejack at the smoothie stand—I put on a mask of a smile and walk past them. I’m perpetually late to my shifts at the Sushi Shack, and they understand when I moved on. And that I look tired.
I am tired. I’m always tired. Missing a night of sleep didn’t change the status quo all that much.
I can’t keep it from them forever, though. They know how anxious I was to get my driver’s license. I made them help me. I can’t just— just keep taking the bus, never mention the van again, and expect them not to notice.
When I get off my shift at the Shack, I’m hoping to get out of the mall fast. Maybe I can find a quiet bench to collapse on while I wait for the bus. (Not that this city’s anti-homeless architecture, putting curves in the back of the benches and making them all U-shaped, makes this easy.) Instead, I find Twilight waiting for me—and heading up a group of my friends.
I don’t even get a grace period. But I should have expected that. Twilight’s brother wasn’t the officer who responded to the crash, but he has friends all over the CCPD, and he must have heard.
My gut seizes up. For a moment, I’m just like I was the instant of the accident—feeling like I’d been wearing blinders, and someone had just ripped them off. And my body is bracing for impact.
Twilight is as the head of the little posse, but Applejack speaks first. “Sunset,” she says, “can I offer you a ride home? I thought you might want a chance to talk about—”
“Why didn’t you call us?” Twilight blurts.
Applejack doesn’t look miffed at the interruption. She shrugs, like she was working up to asking the same thing anyway.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I didn’t get hurt, and—”
Twilight reaches to touch my wrist. "My brother said they took you to urgent care.”
The violence of my reaction surprises me. I yank my hand away, and take a quick step back, preventing her—or any of them—from touching me. “I said I’m fine. I don’t need all of you clustering around me like I lost a grandma.”
Twilight jerks her hand back like she’s touched a hot kettle. The worst thing is, I don’t even feel bad about the look she gives me.
“Let me give you a ride home,” Applejack says. “It’ll be faster than waiting for the bus, and I’m heading in that direction anyway—”
“Just let me go,” I snap, and shove me way through them. Harder than I intend.
I know the wrong thing to do is charge past them. I know that. Just like I know that the wrong way to feel about this is what I’m feeling now, this nauseating swill of heat and rage. It burns behind my eyes. 
All the adrenaline of the crash is back again and I don’t know why. It’s all I can do to keep from snarling until I’m out of their sight. My hands shake.
For as tired as I’d been getting off work, when I get to the bus stop bench, I can’t imagine sitting. I’m too full of bitter energy. I feel like an empty aluminum can, tossed on the side of the road. 
When I close my eyes, strange afterimages—the lights from the crash—dance behind them.
It wasn’t just that, at the moment of my crash, my body stopped feeling like my own. Something in my brain jarred loose. 
I’m right back to where I’d been before I came through the portal. I hate being myself now just as much as much as I did then.

*

There are times when I know I don’t have a future on this world.
And I don’t mean that there are times when I think that I do. I mean that there are times when I can avoid or put off thinking about it, and times when I can’t.
I like to think I fit in pretty well on this side of the portal. I have friends. I go out for coffee. I stream video games, and other human things. I’ve learned more about people, ponies, and magic than I ever did on Equestria.
The longer I stay here, the more exhausted I get.
It’s not a magical effect… I don’t think. It's not because I'm so far from home, at least not in any material sense. I don’t have anyone or anything to blame for the exhaustion but myself. Probably the same thing would have happened if I’d stayed in Equestria (if I’d survived staying in Equestria).
The energy I used to have leaves a void behind. Sometimes that void fills in.
Sometimes rage comes in, and nothing and no one around me meets my standards—least of all myself. Before I totaled my van, sometimes I would go out and sit in it and scream. When Pinkie lost my new phone after borrowing it for five minutes, or Rainbow Dash flunked on an exam I helped her study for and I could tell she’d been crying and trying not to show it... I had a place I could go and feel a little bit better. 
I couldn’t take the van anywhere—not legally, not with just my learner’s permit—but I still had it. It was nice just to have a place to get away from my apartment’s thin walls. The van was nice and safe and anonymous, especially at night. Safe in a strange, animalistic sense. Even if I hadn’t had neighbors, it wouldn’t have felt right to scream where I slept.
At least I felt something.
The worst times were when nothing at all filled the void. Without the van, my urge to get away to scream vanishes. And my mood becomes blacker and bleaker than ever.
I’ve been in this place before. The quieter my moods get, the more dangerous they are.
The last time I was in this place had been the night before I’d abandoned Princess Celestia. Right before I imploded. I committed a soft kind of suicide by throwing my life away, and vanishing into that portal.
I used to be very emotionally invested in my magical studies. I swore at my books. I paced up and down the library aisles, muttering obscenities and magical formulae to myself. I researched a soundproofing spell just to have somewhere, like my van later, to scream or cry every once in a while. I won’t say I was happy, because I wasn’t, but I felt things. When there was a void, the void filled in. I felt like I could fit there. Like there was a future I could be a part of, even if my role wouldn’t have one hundred percent the one that I would have chosen for myself.
Until the end. Until Princess Celestia and I started growing apart. Until I realized that maybe I couldn’t fit into her future.
I stopped pacing. I stopped cursing at my books. I stopped, I thought at the time, feeling. 
Everything was bleak, and black, and dull, and exhausting.
I feel the same way now.
My building’s mailbox is just inside the front door. I used to check it every day when I first got here and needed to work overtime to establish an identity. Now I only have the energy to look at it every three to four days. After the accident, I go for a week without checking it.
When I finally sort through it, and find the bill and the legal threat from the driver who struck me, I’m not surprised. I’m not anything at all. I don’t feel anything except dull acknowledgement. Of course everything would be worse than I expected.
The tiredness I feel today is just a little blacker than yesterday’s tiredness.
I can’t pay this lady’s bills. Not while working the job that I have (and am barely keeping). Not while paying rent. Not while buying food. And not while trying to figure out finances and aid for a college I don’t even think I’ll get.
Ten thousand bits for the car, and two thousand in medical expenses. Her car wasn’t even totaled, and she was fine afterwards. Fuck. 
But I can’t fight it. The crash was my fault.
I can’t imagine a way forward. There’s just a blank. 
That makes it easier to set the letter aside and act as though I never saw it.
The future won’t be any less hopeless, either way.

*

There are times when I just can’t.