Dear Rarity,
Sometimes I worry that when you come home you will find me a bit droll. You have changed and grown so much, and yet I feel I barely have moved an inch since I first wore this crown.
I miss writing letters to Princess Celestia. I miss the days in Ponyville after Princess Luna came, when we traded chess moves by mail. I miss my library. I miss my little town life. It was so novel for me then, and I was a bit naive. But I wasn’t wrong, not really. Life was beautiful in Ponyville. I’m told it still is—I admit, I’ve quietly made sure it stays that way for all these years. But I have a feeling that somepony growing up there would be happy even if I hadn’t.
Before Luna, when I was alone aside from Spike, I could not have imagined the ways our world would change in only two decades. I had no way of anticipating that Luna’s return would bring with her the ancient storehouses of knowledge. I had no idea that I would play a part in changing the face of magic so completely that I would not only be sitting on Celestia’s proverbial seat, but that I would also be ushering in an age of travel beyond the stars.
I am not sure if I thought of the future at all then, truly. I thought I did! But it only occurred to me as a kind of distant mirage.
I know you’re with one of the colonies now. I admit, I was surprised that you wanted this, but I know you have your reasons. You seemed so happy as we moved your itinerary to allow you two weeks with the colonists before the next tour of the frontier. As I thought that moment over in my mind the past year, I began to suspect that you know exactly the feeling I am tiptoeing around. Am I right? Do you also dream of sunny streets and late breakfast at Sugar Cube?
Twilight
Dearest Twilight,
Do you ever find yourself arrested by the vastness of things?
Perhaps age is giving me pause, but as I walked off the ramp of my ship this morning I felt… Small. As in, I looked out and saw the city sprawl beyond the spaceport and realized I would need far longer than I had available to see it all. I would need weeks. It was only a million souls, and it was already too massive for a single pony, even one as well-traveled and worldly as yours truly.
I hadn’t felt so small, so a part of something whether I wanted to be or not in a decade or more, my time. Not since I started crossing the stars in your name. (My dear, my love, I wish I could nobly insist it was on your behalf in truth but we both know that I am a glutton for adventure as much as glory! But I promise I bear your name well!) As I reflected on the feeling in the quarters provided to me and the rest of the Equestrian mission here, I turned over the feeling and realized that its intensity was at least in part due to novelty. I haven’t felt anything other than grand and all-seeing and world-wise in decades, my time. And suddenly I was just one single pony again, too small to see even a single world in less than weeks.I was not just confined to terrestrial limits but was contextualized by them.
Tonight my robes, silk from the merchants at Horizon Prime, feel a bit more paltry than previously. The filigree in my legs and the magic that courses through my horn feel a bit more mundane and material. Even the allure of a holonovel is colored by this feeling. I want to say I feel less connected, yet more connected, to this world and all the others. More aware that it is, in fact, a world—more aware now than I have been in so long.
Do you ever feel small, in the whirlwind of affairs on our sacred cradle-world? Do you still remember being a single, small pony?
Rarity
Rarity, too long from home.
How can one not feel small?
The universe is, perhaps, infinite. We haven’t quite proven it yet. But it is functionally so even if it is not precisely so. Specks of dust in the eye of creation. Our planet is a droplet of water on a windowpane.
I feel small every day. It used to scare me. I think my studying was always about banishing the feeling of smallness. I had a good run of it! I cast any inkling of my smallness out of my mind absolutely for years and years. Until at some point, when I wasn’t watching vigil, it snuck back in. I was up to my wings in paperwork and you and all our friends were out living life. I got up, stretched, put on a new pot of coffee, and while it brewed I decided to take your advice and open up the windows and step out on the balcony. Enjoy the fresh air.
And overlooking Canterlot I felt it, years and years of it all at once. I couldn’t stop thinking about how despite the wings and the crown and the height and all of it, all of my work and all of my trials, I was still not much bigger in comparison to my birthplace than I had been when I first met you. I was always going to be just one pony, no matter how important, in a city full of them. One pony with her own day and work and hobbies in a teeming, roiling city full of ponies with their own problems and hurts and agendas and work and hobbies and complicated social lives. How on earth did I know what I was doing? Did I know what I was doing? Did anyone? Could anyone, really?
The mood did not last. I finished my work that night. But I had to stop for half an hour and just sit on my balcony with coffee listening, thinking, trying to recover a sense of wholeness. It was like all of a sudden my whole being collapsed under some unfelt weight. If that is what you feel, then I am not sure what to say. Should I offer consolation? Or should I say what comes to mind first, which is that good—because that feeling changed me, a little bit. I return to it whenever I am tempted to grandiosity or foolishness or rashness. Whenever I become absorbed in my own internal feelings and thoughts, I think about that balcony. Maybe you will do the same, now, between worlds.
Twilight