I still remember the night my parents died.
We were supposed to go out for dinner together as a family, to celebrate the end of the school year, my graduation, and something about my father’s work that I was too self-absorbed to pay any real attention to. I backed out of it, though, at the last minute; I was in the middle of a phone call with my best friend who was regaling me all the details of how she hooked up with the captain of the baseball team at a graduation party the week before. When you’re eighteen-years-old, those details were the single most important things in the world, and it was the age before everyone had a cell phone so I had no intention of leaving my coveted spot next to the telephone. As for Luna, she was just starting those teenage years where being seen in public with her family was considered worse than the plague.
I figured my parents deserved a night for just the two of them. God knows between sports, clubs, student councils, and the selfish need to follow every latest fashion trend made raising two teenage girls a full-time job in and of itself. Mom and Dad promised they would pick us up some burgers or something on the way back. The only thing I said to them as they left was, ‘remember, no pickles.’ They were the last words I would ever say to them. Luna didn’t say anything.
Again, no cell phones, so when the hours passed and nobody returned home, I didn’t give it a second thought. I was still too preoccupied wondering if perhaps my friend could use her newfounded relationship to put in a good word for me with the baseball team’s assistant captain. I had no idea what had even happened until the police showed up at our door.
I don’t even remember what the police officer said. The rest of the night became something of a blur, lost in a swirling miasma of emotions. The biggest thing that stuck with me ever since that night was that emptied, hollow feeling that followed. It was as if somebody had just reached inside and tore out a huge part of me. It became almost sickening when the realization finally set upon me that nothing in my life was ever going to be the same; things could never go back to the way they were. My parents were gone; my sister would drift away from me little by little; and though my friends tried their best, none of them knew how exactly to deal with me anymore. It was like I was suddenly a different person to them: it was like I was some broken toy to them.
I had never felt more alone in my life.
Though it felt like my world had ended, the real world kept moving forward, and I had no choice but to keep with it if I didn’t want to be left behind. Soon I had to start attending college courses, I had to get a part-time job, I had to keep on top of ever-increasing piles of school work, and I had to watch over a younger sister who needed far more help than I was capable of giving, not that I realized it at the time. The thought of trying to survive an entire year at college felt like an impossible task. ‘How could I ever be okay again?’ I often found myself thinking.
But then I met Daring Dee, long before she took up the pen name of A.K. Yearling, and she helped me find myself again. She was patient and caring, asking nothing of me except for a chance. And, as though I were some stray kitten, little by little with small gestures and gentle coaxing, she lured me out from the room that I had locked myself away from the world in. I don’t know what compelled her to reach out to me, but sometimes a person didn’t need a reason. She never handled me with kid gloves, but she never tried to pry either. Even without knowing the whole story, I could always tell that she accepted me for who I was, imperfections and all.
Not too long after that, though, came my chance encounter with Sombra at a faculty-sponsored party that Dee had convinced me to attend. At the time, I just told myself that I was only going to keep my friend company, and that I would be home before the sun could even start to set. Little did I realize how much my life would change from that one night alone. Romance was the furthest thing from my mind when we first met; in fact, the only thing on my mind at the time was telling him what I thought of his opinion and where he could stuff it. He was driven, and passionate, and he had a sort of antiquated charm about him that felt out of place in a modern college campus. A person could spend an afternoon with him and swear he came from some royal family in a distant land on the other side of the world. He was one of the few people I knew in college who would regularly challenge me, not just by taking a contrary position to whatever I was arguing at the time, but by reminding me day after day that I could do better, be better.
Somewhere along the way, in the years of college and those that came after, ‘I’m not okay’ gradually became ‘I’m fine’. Or at least, I thought I was. I soon had a husband and a promising career ahead of me; I had coworkers that I enjoyed and considered friends, and I had students that looked up to me and respected me. I thought I had everything I could ever need.
But then I met Sunset Shimmer, and it felt as though a light turned on inside; a light that shone upon a part of me that had been left in the dark for so long that I had forgotten it even existed. A small, forsaken recess in my soul that I had walled off years ago, and before I could even be consciously aware of it, she had planted herself inside it. It became our little private garden, our hideaway from a world that felt increasingly cold and distant. For a time, it felt as though every little decision, every crossroad in my life, had led me to her. I always insisted that everything I did was to help her and to protect her, but in hindsight, it would not have been unfair to say that she was saving me as well.
And when she was gone, it was as though the light in my life had gone out.
It was some hours after the incident before my husband and I were finally allowed to return home. We spoke with cops and detectives and school officials, or rather Sombra did while I had stayed in his office, huddled under a towel and soaked with rain. If anything was said to me, I cannot for the life of me remember any of it.
Only after I was settled into our car did the initial shock finally begin to wear off. It was the night of my parent’s death all over again; just nothing but a cold, numbing emptiness for all of my guilt and fear to coalesce and grow. The rain was still coming down hard, which at least kept me from being in complete silence on the drive home. My husband kept giving me worried sideways glances every chance he could. He probably wanted to say something, or felt he had to, but even he was at a loss.
As for myself, I could only continue to wallow in silent disbelief. ‘How?’ just kept running through my mind over and over, along with images of her heartbroken expression before she stormed out of my classroom. It all seemed so unreal. How could something that was so full of life and energy just suddenly be gone? Surely some sort of cosmic law of conservation was being violated by this.
Eventually, though, even the silence got too difficult to endure. “So what’s going to happen now?” I murmured, still gazing blankly out the window.
“The… uh, school board will handle most of it from here,” my husband answered, ever the administrator. “They’ll notify the rest of the faculty, and the lawyers will handle any of the legal matters; the union reps will contact us if the police have any questions; and I’ll see about drafting an announcement to inform the students… though I suspect word will spread pretty quickly on its own over the weekend.” He let out a heavy sigh that had an almost palpable tension within it. “God, I knew one day I’d have to handle something like this, I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”
It wasn’t what I had hoped for, but then again I wasn’t certain what kind of response I truly wanted. He probably felt just as uncertain as I did, and looked for answers in the safest, surest way he knew how—via his job. I wished I could’ve done the same, but my job was what led to this situation in the first place.
“I… I think you should take some time off work next week,” Sombra suggested, perhaps sensing my continuing unease. “The school year is almost over; we can find someone to cover your duties in the meantime. I… I know the two of you were close, and that I didn’t always approve of what was happening but… I’m sorry.” I think he was grasping at straws by that point—a desperate attempt to find the right words to comfort his wife. Maybe he felt compelled to do something, anything, even if it was little more than countering any growing sense of impotence. “We’ll get through this, Tia, okay?”
Had it involved anyone other than Sunset, I probably would’ve been able to find solace in his words. That day, though, he chased an impossible dream, and there were no words that could’ve changed how I felt. How could anything ever be okay again after this?
I wasn’t even sure if I could get through the entire car ride home. The same nagging thought kept rampaging through my mind like a mad bull. A part of me just wanted to scream as loud as I could, if only just to relieve the pressure. I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t say something—do something. Anything!
An actual explosion might’ve been better.
“This is all my fault.” I didn’t realize what I had uttered until long after the words had passed my lips in little more than a quiet murmur.
“Now that’s just ridiculous,” Sombra shot back almost instantly, much to his credit. “Listen, it’s normal to want to try and find someone or something to blame in these situations, but you can’t just—you were her teacher, not her keeper. You’re not responsible for everything that happens to her. She ran out into the street, you didn’t—”
“Yes, I did,” I snapped, guilt overriding every ounce of logic I had remaining. “She trusted me… she opened herself up and confided in me, and I… I hurt her when she was most vulnerable…” Words and tears just tumbled out, and while I buried my face into my palms in an attempt to hide it all, I felt like all my shame was on display for the world. “I pushed her away. She trusted me, and I betrayed her.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” my understandably confused husband replied. “Did… did the two of you talk before the accident? What did she say?”
“She said she was in love with me.”
No sooner had I said that, the car screeched to an abrupt halt, which almost threw me into the dashboard. We were lucky that the traffic was light or we could’ve been involved in an accident of our own.
“In love?” Sombra repeated with a hinted note of creeping worry.
I nodded back.
“W-well, that’s… that’s just youth talking. She was obviously confused a-and… and reading too much into things. You can’t blame yourself for her misguided feelings.”
“I know that!” I insisted. “She was just a child—she couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, but that doesn’t matter! Those feelings were real for her, and I wasn’t thinking about that when I answered her. I was… I was only thinking of myself, of my career…” I sunk further into my seat as every sentence grew harder to speak. “She needed help then more than ever, and I pushed her away. I should’ve known better.”
And that, in my mind, was the worst part of all: I should have known. I was the teacher, and she was the student; I was supposed to be the one to act calmly and deliberately, to not allow emotions to run rampant. It was an easy cop-out to try and shoulder some of the blame onto Sunset Shimmer: she was a lonely teenager, acting on irrational impulses and emotions.
But what teenager didn’t do that?
Not that I was acting any more rationally during or after the incident. It just went to show that being an adult didn’t mean we were infallible actors always running off logic and sound judgement. And at the time, I couldn’t appreciate just how impossible of a situation I had put my husband into, who now had just as many things to worry about plus a wife who was in a mental, guilt-ridden spiral. We were all still in shock, really, and grief does a terrible thing to a person’s judgement. I can understand why my husband then suggested what he did, even if, looking back, it was the advice that would doom our relationship.
“Listen, Tia, we’ll get through this,” he reassured me, turning his attention back to driving. “But… it’s probably best if you don’t mention that conversation to anyone. At times like these, people just want someone to blame. They’re not interested in understanding.”
He was trying to save me from others just as much as save me from myself. Blame was such an easy trap to fall into. It made the world seem less chaotic, less uncontrollable. If there was someone to blame, then things could be fixed, made right, or prevented from happening again. But chances were, there was probably nothing I could’ve done at the time to change how things ended up. It was more than likely I had put Sunset Shimmer on her path the moment I invited her into that music room. Or maybe I was just finding more ways to blame myself.
Things, I was convinced, would never be fine again.
********************
In the wake of Sunset’s death, I followed my husband’s suggestion and took a leave of absence for the remainder of the school year. People knew that we were close, so nobody thought twice about it; just another person dealing with their grief. The school held a memorial service later that week, but I couldn’t bring myself to attend. I don’t recall even leaving the house for quite some time. To be honest, much of the aftermath had become something of a blur of endless days locked away in my own misery. I was terrified of what might happen if I went out into the world again—of what I might do to myself, what people might do to me if they knew…
For the first time ever, I found myself grateful that the school year was over. If I had to tread those halls again, I was liable to have a complete breakdown, not that my heart wasn’t already shattered to pieces. She was gone, and in my isolation, the only thing I wound up doing was becoming ever more convinced that I alone bore sole responsibility for what happened. Of course, I had the conclusion I wanted and just spent the weeks dredging up every piece of evidence that supported it.
Soon, the summer months came and, just as my husband had told me, the school board voted to shut down our school. After giving the news a few days to circulate through the community, he and the Mi Amore family swooped in to save the day, pleading to re-open the school under private ownership in order to allow the students to continue their education and graduate together. It made for excellent headlines and photo ops, and from a business standpoint, it was a brilliant move that kept them in the discussions for some time. The discount they offered for the returning students was something of a bargain as well, or so I was told by my husband, who made it a point to emphasize the fact that he had pushed hard for that. In fairness to him, had I been in a better state of mind at the time, such news would have helped redeem his actions in my eyes, but the only sinner I was fixated on was myself. Schools politics had become a distant concern for me.
One of the hardest things about dealing with death is that you so rarely can put the rest of the world on pause while you deal with your grief. People had to get back to work, the students had to finish their classes, and the world needed to keep moving forward. Sombra had been patient enough with me, but even I realized that I couldn’t stay holed up in my home forever. Unfortunately, by the time I reached that point, the summer months had already passed by, and I hadn’t given a second thought about my career. Taking up the Mi Amore offer to work at the school with my husband was out of the question; it was no longer a matter of philosophical viewpoints towards private education, but rather the school itself had become a poisoned well. There was just no way I could go back there.
That left me with only one other real option, and that was to find work elsewhere in the school district. If I hadn’t been borderline catatonic throughout the summer, I may have already had a new position lined up and waiting for me in the new school year, but I hadn’t, so I was forced to find work where I could as a substitute teacher. It was probably for the best, really. Teaching just didn’t feel quite the same anymore; it didn’t fill me with the same energy as it once had. The students deserved a teacher who could give them their all, and I was still stuck second-guessing myself whether any decisions might lead to another tragedy.
Maybe it was paranoia, or just anxiety, but every time I tried to teach, I just saw Sunset Shimmer everywhere. Every student, every question, every decision just felt like it connected back to her in some way or another, and that everyone around just somehow knew what I had done. It was crazy, of course, but I had no outlet for my guilt, and nobody to console me. Once the new school started up, Sombra was even busier than he was when he had been acting vice principal, and few of my former coworkers reached out to me. The rational side knew that it was probably just due to them being busy as well, but my growing anxiety said it was because they knew as well. Or at the very least, had suspicions. My relationship with Sunset wasn’t something I hid, and given the unspoken reasons as to why the previous vice principal left, surely everyone was hypervigilant for inappropriate relations. Maybe they were all just avoiding me.
Just like when I lost my parents, it was as though a gaping hole had been left in my life; an emptiness that just swallowed up any hopes and happiness. Unlike the previous, however, that hole never seemed to close up. It just… lingered, like a festering wound, never fully leaving my thoughts, even as the weeks and months passed by. I thought, perhaps, that I had been getting better, but looking back I think I was simply getting accustomed to those empty feelings. Ignoring the pain was no substitute for healing.
And that’s why all those feelings I had kept inside came to a head one fateful autumn afternoon.
I was at the grocery store, one of the few places I still frequented, albeit more out of necessity than anything. Little by little, ever since that fateful day, I had been crawling back out into the world for something other than work. A walk here, a small trip to the shop there; never anything spectacular, but what I needed was a sense of normalcy. Finding comfort in returning to a routine was one of the few vestiges of solace I could still find in life. Despite my best efforts, that heartbroken look of hers was still etched into my mind. As it was the middle of the day, everyone I knew was at work or in class, so my emotional guard wasn’t prepared when I turned the corner of the aisle, in search of tomato sauces, and I found myself face-to-face with a familiar young man.
“Oh, Ms. Celestia! H-hey.”
It was a student of mine, or rather a former one; a student that had since graduated and whose college courses didn’t require his presence at this hour of the day. More importantly, he was one of Sunset Shimmer’s friends from the music club—the drummer that I first introduced her to. He wasn’t the first former pupil of mine that I’ve run into, but he was among the ones I least wanted to see right now.
“Hello there,” I replied, mustering up what levity I could on short notice. “Have you settled into your new classes at college? You said you were going into… history, right?”
“Yeah. It’s, um, it’s going well. It’s… it’s good. The professors are great, although they don’t quite measure up to you. Met some interesting classmates—actually getting set up for a little house party.”
“That would explain all the soft drinks you have there,” I said, gesturing to the numerous boxes in his shopping cart.
“Well it’s the least I could do,” he said with an embarrassed chuckle. He seemed tense, anxious even. It felt as though he wasn’t sure what to say, but at the same time compelled to do so. “Um, h-how are you doing? You, uh… never came back to classes after… you know.”
I felt guilty to be on the receiving end of his sympathies. They were far more than I deserved, and if he knew the truth, I doubt he would’ve even taken the time to speak with me. And of course, I couldn’t tell him the truth about how I was either, lest that lead to even more questions. All I could do was put on a fake smile as I replied.
“It’s been tough, but I’m managing.”
“Good. That’s… uh, that’s good to hear.”
At first I thought he just wasn’t convinced, but as he lingered around in awkward silence, his eyes constantly darting between me and the floor, I began to get the impression there was something else weighing on him. It made me anxious: did he know something? Did he have suspicions? I couldn’t stay any longer, if for no other reason than a worry I wouldn’t be able to maintain the facade of calmness.
“A-anyways, I should get going. You take care now.”
Turning to leave, however, just appeared to give the young man the last kick of courage he needed. “Ms. Celestia, wait!” he blurted out. Now I had little choice but to hear whatever else he had. “Um, l-listen, I know this might be asking a lot,” he began, a faint quiver in his voice, “but people said they saw Sunset Shimmer go into your classroom that day. Before the accident.”
I couldn’t deny that: my classroom was on the way out for a lot of students so it was easy for anyone to have seen her enter at the time. “She… she was. We talked for a bit.”
“About what? If you don’t mind me asking.” He looked nervous, as though he was dreading every time I spoke.
“School, mostly. I just found out the high school was going to be closed down, and she was still uncertain about where she’d go after graduating.”
“Did she seem like something was bothering. Like, home life, or school? Did she say anything strange?” I thought he was probing for something, but I couldn’t tell what exactly it was. It definitely wasn’t about what actually happened, or otherwise he would’ve been a little more direct. I should’ve realized what was happening sooner because he was searching for answers, but for a different reason.
“I’m… not sure I follow.”
“It’s just that everyone in the music club knew something was bothering her,” he explained. “She was distracted when we chatted, and you could hear it when she was playing that her mind was somewhere else. We all kept asking, but she always just brushed us off.”
There were few things worse than seeing somebody fret over something that you knew the answer to, but couldn’t say. It made sense that Sunset Shimmer had been anxious in the weeks leading up to the end of the school year: she was so scared of what was going to happen to us once she graduated. I still couldn’t understand why it had to be me? There were so many good people around her to choose from; people her age who could better understand her.
“I just… I just don’t understand how this happened. When she—” He stopped abruptly, just as the quiver in his voice returned, and at first I thought he was getting anxious again, but then I saw a glistening in the corner of his eyes. He wasn’t scared; he was just on the verge of crying. “She ran out into the pouring rain without her coat, or an umbrella, or even her bags. That’s not a thing a person normally does. And sure it was raining hard, but it wasn’t as if you couldn’t see a car in that weather. There’s no way an accident like that could’ve just happened unless she… unless she…”
He was about one finished sentence from a complete breakdown, but in retrospect, when I reached and embraced him in that grocery store, it was less about comforting him than it was for myself. I didn’t want to even consider his implications to be the truth. The pain was bad enough without twisting the knife.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I reassured him gently. He had probably told himself that a hundred times over, but maybe hearing it from someone else was what he needed, as he began to calm down soon afterwards. “You did everything you could for her.”
It was easy to forget that I wasn’t the only person struggling with their grief, and maybe not the only person who had yet to move forward, try as we might. There wasn’t time to worry about how things might look, a teacher hugging a former student in the middle of a busy grocery store. Sure, some people stared as they passed by, but they otherwise gave us our space. I thought for certain that he would pull away, but he held onto the embrace.
“I miss her so much,” he whimpered softly.
With a heavy sigh, I nodded back. “Me too.”
“Why did she have… why couldn’t she just talk to us? I thought we were friends. I just don’t understand.”
There was a part of me that was screaming to tell him what really happened, about why he had to spend his summer nursing his grief rather than playing music with his friend; that he had been the best friend Shimmer ever had and how her eyes always brightened when he was around. Had things not ended the way they had, I would’ve sworn that she had grown sweet on him. Not only did he have to cope with losing whatever hopes and dreams he had of a future with Shimmer, he had to do it all without knowing the truth. There was probably some self-serving, half-baked reason that I convinced myself was reasonable as to why I remained silent, but looking back the answer remained the same as always: I was still scared of the truth.
“Life isn’t always kind enough to provide us with answers,” I said in a paltry attempt to provide some kindness while I cruelly kept him in the dark. “We’ll all have to learn how to cope without them, just as we must learn how to live without her. Just… promise me you’ll remember her for the bright and wonderful person she was.”
We stood there for a good two or three minutes, maybe even longer. He sobbed quietly the whole time. I don’t know if anything I said made a difference for him; I like to think that they helped a little. And if nothing else, I gave him an ear to voice his grief to, and a shoulder to cry on. How often was a boy afforded the opportunity to do so without the fear of shame or ridicule? I wanted to join him, but it would’ve attracted too much attention if we both were. Plus, I just lied to him, so if nothing else I didn’t deserve any such solace.
********************
The encounter at the grocery store left me with a lot to dwell on for the remainder of the day. Most of it was just guilt and self-loathing, replaying the scene over and over in my mind as I cursed my cowardice more with every cycle. The worse my sense of guilt, the more I hated myself for staying silent, which in turn just made me feel even guiltier. This self-reinforcing cycle kept spiraling throughout the rest of the day, and by the time my husband returned home, late in the evening, I had reached a breaking point.
He found me in the bedroom, hunched over a suitcase that I was in the midst of packing full with whatever clothing I could fit into it. Not even the neat and orderly sort of packing either: I was cramming in pants and blouses into it like I was stuffing a holiday turkey. It was an understandably worrying sight for my husband, who stood in the bedroom doorway for several moments before speaking up.
“Tia, what’s going on here?” he asked, a wariness in his voice that was to be expected.
Even though this was a conversation I knew was coming and had tried to mentally prepare for it a dozen times over, all I could manage was a meek utterance of, “I can’t stay here.”
A pretty self-evident answer, obviously, since one didn’t pack a suitcase with the intention to stay, but my growing anxiety offered little else. My train of thought had grown despondent over the course of the day, and now that I had to face Sombra, everything just fell apart. It was like stagefright except the audience was your own nagging, frantic thoughts.
“I… I don’t understand.”
“I can’t stay!” I snapped. “I… I just can’t. I ran into one of her friends today. At the grocer. He wanted to know why it all happened, a-a-a-and I couldn’t tell him.”
“Her friends?” Sombra repeated as he tried to piece together my ramblings. “You mean one of Sunset’s friends? Honey, I know it still hurts, but you don’t need to keep punishing yourself over it. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Didn’t I?” I shouted as I swung around. “I lied to him, Sombra. He just wanted to know why his friend had to die, and I lied to his face. And then he thanked me afterwards. He trusted me! What kind of person does that to one of their students? To anyone, even?”
It was obvious that I was in the middle of an emotional crisis. As a teacher, it was something we had training courses about—how to recognize, how to contain, how to manage. Whenever I sat in those lectures, I always found myself wondering what was going through the mind of a person when they were in the midst of a crisis. How could a person lose all hold of their rationality. That evening gave me some first-hand experience with it. Sombra approached me, and he made a valiant effort to try and comfort me, but the moment his hands touched me, I just instinctively pushed him away. I felt… vile. Unworthy of any kind of human affection.
“I can’t do this anymore! Everyday I’m either lying to myself or I’m lying to the world. It’s… it’s suffocating me, Sombra. I’m tired of being afraid of everyone, and I’m starting to hate myself for it.”
Despite his calm composure, it would be inaccurate to say that the events surrounding Sunset’s death hadn’t affected my husband. I doubt anyone could handle that plus a new job plus a wife who was spiralling further into despair. I was so fixated on my own problems, I never considered how he was coping. He tried to be as supportive as he could in the intervening months, but me pushing him away must have been the final straw.
“For god’s sake Celestia, can you just stop and listen to yourself for one second?” he snapped back, the last vestiges of restraint buckling in his voice. “What happened to Sunset was tragic, but that was her doing. You didn’t ask for her to have feelings for you, and you turned her down like any responsible adult would. If you keep this up, all you’re going to do is ruin both of our lives. Is that what you want?”
In his own cold logic, Sombra was right about a great many things. I could never control Sunset’s reaction, and while my reaction had been in haste, few would argue that it was unwarranted. At the time, grief made it hard for me to mentally separate moral responsibilities from legal ones. I didn’t care to parse the differences, and rather than recognize his concern for our well-being, I hooked onto the entirely wrong interpretation.
“Our lives? What about hers? The only thing you seem to care about is that blasted school that you stole!” Again, I was going after what I knew to be a soft target and unfairly so, but if I were thinking rationally, I wouldn’t have been in such a panic in the first place. “I was entrusted with her, and I let her down, and yet the only thing that seems to matter to you is how things will reflect on you. Well, just because you didn’t care about her, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.”
To no surprise, he didn’t take the accusation well. Now it wasn’t just a matter of defending his position, but his own integrity. “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have asked you to look into her case in the first place!” he shot back. “You were the one who tempted her along with all that guitar playing. If you had just known your place as a teacher and didn’t string her along, none of this would’ve happened!”
“So it would’ve been fine if she were just emotionally dead? You’ve seen what usually happens to students who’re like how she was—high school becomes a miserable experience, and they carry those scars with them into adulthood.”
“At least they get a chance to be adults!”
It took every ounce of willpower I had not to slap him across the face for that. While I regretted how things ended, I refused to believe for a second that I should’ve let Sunset Shimmer wallow in her isolation, that reaching out to her was wrong. To accept that would undermine everything I believed in as a teacher. Unable to find the right words to throw back at my husband, I just glared fiery daggers at him for a few seconds before I could straighten out my thoughts.
“I’m going back to Canterlot,” I stated, barely able to contain my anger. “I’ve already made arrangements to stay with my sister. I need to… find myself again, or figure out a way past all of this. To do that, I need some time away from this city, and everything connected to her. And that includes you.”
Looking back, the news probably hurt him far more than I could’ve anticipated. He did what he often did when he was hurt, though; he got even angrier, which just made it all the harder for me to realize what I was doing to him. “You know what, fine! Leave! It’ll only be a few weeks before you realize what a mistake this is.”
While I wasn’t technically finished packing my suitcase, I had enough to make due, so I decided to leave right then and there. It wasn’t far to the nearest bus stop, and I was prepared to wait at the station for however long it took to catch the next train to Canterlot. If I hung around, there was a good chance that he could talk me out of this, and, rightly or wrongly, I knew I had to do this. Maybe it was selfish of me to go and throw away my entire life without even consulting him beforehand, but I was convinced I knew how he would answer and that he would never go along with it.
“Well, if you’re right then this won’t be a big deal, and I’ll be back in before Hearth’s Warming,” I said, continuing my reckless defiance. I grabbed a few more personal effects on my way out, including my guitar of all things, but stopped just shy of stepping out the door. “You can save all your ‘I told you so’s for then. Until that day, however, don’t bother trying to contact me.”
Whatever response he might’ve had, I didn’t stay around long enough to listen. I had said what I needed to say, and so out the door I went. I never once looked back.
And that was the end of my life in Phillydelphia.
********************
Canterlot was a breath of fresh air, if for no other reason than it simply being a far smaller and less crowded city. More importantly, it was still home to me, and the familiar sights and sounds that I had grown up around provided a small comfort for my grieving heart. My sister, though somewhat reluctant to share her small apartment with me, was nevertheless understanding and patient with me. I had always felt a little guilty that I never told her the full extent of why I needed to leave Phillydelphia, but I believe a part of her knew that something was wrong and that I needed time to heal. She probably chalked it up to a fight with Sombra, which wasn’t too far from the truth.
After a few weeks, I realized I couldn’t just sit around and mope in my sister’s apartment, however. I was, in fact, very close to admitting that my husband might’ve been right and that I had made yet another huge mistake. Stubbornness and a well-timed suggestion from my sister proved to be just what I needed. Luna had only just started teaching herself, and she asked for a little bit of assistance, even if it meant unofficial, unpaid assistance. She had a good relation with the principal at her school, and she asked for a favour that at least allowed me to help her as a sort of teaching assistant for a little while.
It wasn’t much, but it got me back into a classroom and on a slightly longer basis than just a couple of days as a substitute. After a few weeks of this arrangement, however, the principal asked if I could help some of the other teachers, and this soon led to more requests and more helping out. Before I knew it, months had passed and I was soon being offered a temporary teaching position, at least until I decided to return to Phillydelphia.
Obviously, I never did go back. Months turned into years, and temporary eventually became permanent. During that time, I eventually did contact Sombra and we finally had the discussion that had been hanging over both our heads for so long. Neither of us really apologized, so it didn’t come as a surprise when I explained to him that I had no intention of going back. Things had been difficult in our marriage for a long time, Sunset’s death just proved to be the final nail in that particular coffin.
My arrangement of sleeping on my sister’s couch eventually changed, too; at first it became a cot in the corner, but after a couple years, we moved out of that tiny apartment and found a house together. Several years later, the principal, who took a chance letting me stay, retired, and on a whim, I applied for the position.
And that’s how I became the principal of Canterlot High.
It was surreal, not just how things turned out, but how quickly time just flew by without me even noticing. It wasn’t until I found myself standing on the grounds just outside the school, surveying what was now to become my school and a new chapter in my life, that I realized that the pain and grief had long since vanished. The thoughts of ‘my life will never return to normal’ had become a distant memory. Life was indeed something resembling normal again, and while a part of me still missed Sunset Shimmer, I had learned how to live with that emptiness. I comforted myself with the fact that I knew as principal I could do everything in my power to ensure that there would never be a repeat of that tragedy.
“Excuse me, but are you… Principal Celestia? I was told to talk to you about enrolling.”
Then you showed up.