You remember back to some shitty advice you read on 4chan a very long time ago: “When you don’t know something, lie. A lie can be very powerful. Tell a lie long and loud enough, to enough people, it will become the truth. And for the times that you can’t lie, blame someone else. There is always someone else for you to blame.” As it turns out, that advice didn’t work unless you either had more money than brains or multiple scummy people to back you up. Not that shitty advice or lying would do you a lick of good right now. Only the truth of your words were any use and, right now, could be as warm and delicious as a Thanksgiving turkey dinner complete with cranberry sauce.
You aren’t in your home city. You’re not even in your home solar system any more. For the past several years you have been living in Equestria, wherever that is, but not from lack of trying. Equestria is the kind of place where friendship can be wrung out of specially treated butterfly nets, dried and powdered, measured on a balance scale, then converted directly into magical energy. Where the emotion of love can be siphoned from the air, jarred, and eaten as food. Where the sunlight that has been reflected off the moon can be captured, refined, fermented, distilled, and bottled to be drunk at a later date. That last part was what you were doing right now. You are sitting on one of your chesterfields, in your living room, at your home along the road a stones throw away from the dirt road that leads through Ghastly Gorge, on the Northern-most city limit of Ponyville, drinking distilled moonbeams out of a short tumbler, and it was glorious. The company wasn’t so bad, either.
Their body was taking up two of the three cushions, with their head laying across your lap. You stroked your hand over the crown of their head, down their neck, and across most of their side on one smooth motion. The path of your fingertips having traced this route many times before and will again many more times after. They liked the familiar closeness, your gentle caress. They often needed it and you didn’t mind one bit. They preferred the touch to anything else you could provide and you preferred to sip on your drink. They brought you their company and you brought the pets. It was a good arrangement.
Tonight was a little different than usual. Your guest arrived late in the evening, unannounced, nearly starving, and looked ready to collapse at any moment. You, being the intelligent intellectual you are, carefully scooped them up off your front stoop and plopped them and yourself on the beige sofa in your living room for some nourishment. Your very fancy crystal decanter half-full of the best magic-based ethanol Equestria had to offer that, if you were asked, fell off the back of a cart and not at all lifted from Luna’s personal stash at the castle. I mean, how would you even have gone about finding a secret stash of booze anyway. Casually lean against a wall sconce and accidentally stumble into a hidden pantry packed floor to ceiling with shelves of bottles? Very unlikely. You also weren’t making plans in your head to go back soon to refill your decanter after tonight and maybe grab a second bottle just in case. These were thirsty times and thirsty times called for thirsty measures.
You took the glass in your hand and gave it a swirl. It didn’t look like anything, not even water. If you didn’t feel the subtitle shift in the balance of the glass as the liquid sloshed around you could have sworn the glass was empty. A faint odour wafted up from the glass to tickle your nose. It smelled a bit like cedar smoke, caramel, and chocolate.
You took a careful sip. The drink hit you as hard as ever. Every sip feels like your first. Your throat burned like you doused a cheese grater in kerosene, lit it on fire, then tried to swallow it. When the liquid hit your stomach it sent a chill down your spine that you could feel in your liver. Your face broke out in a hot sweat like you gave a rimjob to a jar of puréed ghost peppers. You forgot time, and for a moment time forgot you. You only existed right now, in the time between one heart beat and the next. This moment is all there ever was and forever will be. Then, as if someone flipped a switch, your suffering was over, and your mouth tasted like peppermint. It was beyond surreal. You glance at the deceptively empty-looking glass. Drinking the rest of this poison might actually kill you, Irish heritage be damned. Distilled moon beams are no joke, fam.
You were sitting on your couch, mindfully sipping your ill-gotten poisonous swill from your natural crystal tumbler, and feeding your guest. Your stories flowed effortlessly as they so often do. You are a natural born storyteller. It helped that Equestria hasn’t invented television or radio yet. They barely had recorded audio and it was damned expensive, not that you wanted to hear their shitty garbage music anyway. You told stories because you always felt the need to fill the silence with something and your stories were better than reading trash from a newspaper or a story book, not that you could even read their gibberish horse words.
Your guest never speaks but that’s okay because you both prefer it that way. They just don’t talk, they never have, since the day you two met. It was a good thing that body language was universal between your species. You could read them better than a human written book full of diagrams and footnotes. Ear flicks, tail wiggles and wags, eye movement, huffs of breath, shakes and nods of the head. There were more subtitle movements that you knew of that helped your guest express themselves but those were the most obvious and important ones.
Tonight was more about them. You drank your bottle of distilled moonbeams, yes, but that was more of an excuse. It helped you loosen up, to get the words flowing. The important part was the closeness. They needed it like a plant needed sunlight and water. Without it they would eventually wither and die. You were their lifeline when all else failed, which it did far more often than they would have liked. When their hunger became too much for them to bare they would come to you. You were their wooden raft of food in an ocean of starvation.
Your hand travelled the familiar path across their body.
“Did I ever tell you the story of how I ended up in Equestria.” You didn’t ask as it wasn’t a question. That’s how statements worked. It was more out of need to fill the silence.
Your guest didn’t make a verbal reply. Their ear flattened agains their head which, to you, meant “I don’t want to hear about it.”
It was a boring story, anyway. There were barely any pirate battles and far too few drunken bar fights. On warm summer nights, when the breeze drifts in off the ocean, you sometimes wonder whatever happened to the piano playing mare with the baby blue eyes, wearing a red dress, with a red carnation in her pink hair.
“Okay. Well, what about a story about how I met my favorite person?”
Their ear slowly raised about halfway back up which meant “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
You slowly ran your hand across their form again. “Spoilers: It’s about you.”
They flicked their ear all the way up in response, like you might move around an old TV antenna when trying to tune an over-the-air station that was mostly static, which meant “I’m listening.”
This was a long story but it was okay because you had all night and your guest was a good listener who was very hungry for your story.