//------------------------------//
// Say Goodbye Like You Mean It 
// Story: Stop Making This Hurt! 
// by mushroompone 
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The ketchup bottle on the table was almost empty.

Almost-empty ketchup bottles take a lot of abuse. Smacking and shaking.

The end of the day must be nice for an almost-empty ketchup bottle.

"Are you still going to the vow renewal?" Starlight asked carefully.

The vow renewal.

Mac and Sugar were still together enough to wanna say it all over again. Though, being honest, I always thought vow renewals were the first sign of trouble.

"He's my brother, ain't he?" I said.

Starlight rolled her eyes. "Am I still coming to the vow renewal?"

The implication: with you?

But she never actually said it.

"Dunno," I said. "Are you?"

She hated when I did that. I could see it on her face. A little crinkle between her eyebrows that I used to think was cute.

"I was planning on it." Nonconfrontational, but biting. A hard “t”, spat at me.

"You can do whatever the hay you like." I took a sip of my coffee. "I ain't the boss of you."

Starlight gave me a look.

"You're giving me the look."

"What look?"

"The anti-honesty look."

She scoffed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just what I said. You don't always like me to tell the truth, and you give me a look when you wish I'd lied to you."

The look again.

"I just know you, is all."

That's the whole problem, she thought.

I know that because I know her, not because she told me.

"That's not the look," Starlight argued. "I'm giving you the lie-of-omission look."

I reached over and took a slice of toast from her plate. "And that is?"

"The look I give when you get off on a technicality," she said, ignoring the toast I'd swiped. "Why don't you want me there?"

I chewed Starlight's toast thoughtfully.

Granny once told me that restaurants use the stale bread for toast since you can't tell the difference anyways.

But I could tell. 

This toast was stale.

"Not your scene," I said simply. "Too mushy."

She sighed. Not our scene, she thought.

She's very good at reading my subtext, even though she pretends she ain't.

“Maybe I like mushy,” Starlight said softly.

It was bitter, though.

You don’t know me as well as you think you do.

She did like mushy.

Sometimes.

I remember a night on the threshold. Breathless and wordless. Our first kiss—before anything else—exchanged between the pouring rain and the soft yellow glow of the lights from the kitchen. 

I leaned to her for the first one.

She pulled me in for the second.

She pulled me into loads of things. Flying kites and pulp romance novels. Picnics and stargazing. She made me think I might like mushy, too.

I tried. I cooked her meals and did the chores she secretly hated and kissed her in the places she secretly liked and it never quite felt like enough.

Starlight was the maker of romance. The way she read it. If I’d written her a toaster manual, she could read it like a love poem.

Twilight says we have an old-fashioned romance, which I believe because all her romances are old fashioned. She's always going out dancing and reciting sonnets and bringing home roses. 

But I think what Twilight meant is that our relationship just feels old. Like it's been in the works a long time. Or like it just ain't that sharp anymore.

Like it's gone stale.

Like diner toast.

Because all those things—all the special dates and the special meals and special words and special living—they turn to work quicker than a fresh-cut apple goes brown when you’re with the wrong pony.

There comes a point where you both know it, and it’s just a game to see who says it first. I guess if you’re with someone a little less stubborn than the two of us, it happens at the right time. 

For us, though, the right time was long gone.

So it just hurt.

That was the crinkle on her brow.

That was the sigh and the eye-roll and the harrumphing.

It was hurt.

But we’re too good to say we’re hurt.

My Granny was the same way. Before she crossed some invisible threshold and became “old”, she was the one fighting to stay awake while bucking apple trees and washing dishes. Then, suddenly, she learned to say no and stop hurting.

Thinking about it, it was around the time she divorced my Gramps.

Funny how you don’t make those connections ‘til later.

“Y’know, Star,” I said, pushing my coffee aside, “I’m gonna miss this.”

She blinked. “Hm?”

“This. Us. I’ll miss it, is all.”

Her mouth opened.

“You know what I mean.”

Her mouth closed.

I sat back in the booth. It let out its own sigh so I didn’t have to. “I was talkin’ to my little cousin Babs the other day, and she told me the worst part of meeting Apple Bloom and her friends was how hard they tried to stay friends. Even though they knew it was impossible.”

Starlight deflated. Her hooves shuffled on the table.

“You get me?”

She nodded. “I… I get you.”

I raised my brows.

Starlight swallowed. The kind of swallow that meant she was just about to cry, but she was gonna do her best to hold it in.

She hated crying in front of other ponies.

I knew that ‘cause I know her. Not ‘cause she told me.

I reached across the table and grabbed her hooves in mine.

“Hey.”

She sniffled. “Hey.”

“It’ll hurt, but not any more than it already does,” I said. “This will stop making it hurt.”

She smiled softly. Nodded. “Applejack?”

“Yes?”

“I think… we need to break up.”

I chuckled. “I reckon we do.”

That made her laugh.

Which made her cry.

Which made me cry.

And then we were two ex-somethings crying in a diner right before it closed.

And that should have been sad.

But it didn’t hurt anymore.

First time in a while.