Dear Twilight Sparkle,
Sorry for not writing to you in such a long time. How are things in Equestria? I hope your princess duties have been boring and easy to deal with lately, but I get the feeling, since I haven’t heard from you in a while, that that’s rarely the case. Don't read too deep into that, though. I understand.
Do you think you’ll have time to come visit me soon? Don’t worry, there haven’t been any magical mishaps in quite a while. While things have been mostly boring on this end, there’s been some personal developments with me and one of our friends, and it has me curious about a few things that only you can answer. I know that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s why I want to talk to you about it in person.
Hope to hear from you soon! Tell Spike and all the others I said hey.
Your friend,
Sunset Shimmer
It’s been a couple weeks since the incident at the Fall Formal. Things have settled down, and life’s been pretty good ever since. The talk my friends and I had after everything happened went much better than I anticipated. We all agreed that I was probably just overly stressed due to the fact that almost everything that had been building over the previous six months all came to a head at the same time. In retrospect, that made a lot of sense.
When I finally confessed to Twilight, I was practically bursting at the seams with pent-up emotions. Having Rarity as an outlet helped, but there was someone else I needed to let those feelings out to. In those same months I was bottling things up, Rarity was doing the exact same thing with no outlet whatsoever. That’s why her confession was just as intense as mine was to Twilight.
All of that, combined with the trauma of last year’s Fall Formal I was staunchly refusing to deal with, turned me into a walking, talking, ticking time bomb. It’s no wonder I exploded. My friends did a wonderful job outlining why I acted the way I did. We all like to think we understand ourselves better than anyone else, but I’ve since learned that’s not always the case. I don’t really know what I’d do without Twilight and the girls. Thankfully, they’ve assured me I’ll never have to answer that so long as they have anything to say about it.
For a few days after the whole ordeal, I was afraid Twilight would come to realize she didn’t actually want to be with such an emotionally unstable wreck. As it turns out, my outbursts have only bolstered her confidence in us. She said she’d be more afraid if I was better at hiding when I felt like that. Not just because the eventual consequences of me bottling things up would be more severe, but because it shows that I trust her enough to deal with how I feel. Can’t say I disagree. I tell her I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to have her, but she just tells me she’s luckier. I love that girl so much.
A couple days after everything happened, I picked up the journal me and Princess Twilight write to each other through and asked her when she could come visit. There’s a question I’ve wanted to ask since the night of the sleepover, but I’ve held myself back from doing it. It might seem kind of silly, and I’m sure anyone else in my position would have done that before anything else, but there’s a few reasons I’ve decided against it until now.
When I first knew I had a crush on this world’s Twilight, why wouldn’t I just write to Princess Twilight and ask her how she feels about me? Why wouldn’t I ask about her sexuality? Wouldn’t that save me a lot of time and heartache? While I can certainly follow that logic, things are rarely so easy.
There are two simple words that explain why I haven’t asked: dimensional divergence. Okay, maybe they’re not that simple, but let me explain.
The easiest observable divergence between our two worlds are the differences between Twilight and Princess Twilight. My Twilight wears glasses, and the princess does not. That’s not because glasses aren’t a thing in Equestria – they definitely are – it’s just one of the ways in which they’re different from each other on a biological level. You know, aside from the whole being a pony versus human thing. The bigger difference between the two is social status. One of them is a princess. The other is a random student.
Princess Celestia and Princess Luna are rulers of Equestria. In this universe, they are both principals at a high school. A high school in the center of a random city in the middle of a vast country full of other cities. The distance between their rungs on the social ladders of their respective worlds are miles apart.
How about my friends? All of my friends here play instruments. Unless you count singing, none of the girls in Equestria play instruments except for Pinkie Pie. All of my friends here are in their mid to late teens, while all the girls in Equestria are in their mid-to-late twenties. Similar to how my friends are younger than their Equestrian counterparts, I am also younger in this dimension than I am in Equestria. In this world, I'm a teenager, but in Equestria I'm around the same age as the princess and her friends. I think it has something to do with how different forms have different perceptions of time, and how our bodies translating from pony to human go through some kind of time-dilating effect. Something complicated like that.
Which brings me to the most important divergence: me! When I arrived here, there was no Sunset Shimmer at this school or even in this city. I pored over any records I could get my hands on at both the school and city hall, but I never found any record of anyone with the same name or photo as me. As far as I’m aware, I don’t even have a dimensional counterpart. That’s not to say they don't exist, but if they did, I would have surely met them by now, right?
I’m not trying to belabor the point. I’m just trying to illustrate the many ways in which this dimension differs from Equestria despite having an analog for almost everything. So while I could have asked Princess Twilight all of those questions from the beginning, there’s no guarantee the answers would be remotely similar to the ones this world’s Twilight would give me.
And to be honest, I think the circumstances under which me and the princess met have permanently influenced how she feels about me. We might be good friends now, but I don’t doubt the answer to me asking her out would be “no” without any hesitation. Stealing the crown probably cemented that before I ever had a chance to think of the question to begin with.
That brings me to today. Princess Twilight has finally found time to sit down and talk with me. We’ve just arrived at my apartment, and we’re sitting across from one another on the couch. I’m currently trying to think of the best way to ask these questions, and I’m finding it much more difficult than I thought it would be. Twilight is sitting patiently waiting, but I can tell the longer I take, the more awkward this feels for her too.
I twiddled my thumbs as I glanced around the room. “I promise I’m not stalling. It’s just… this is really weird and hard to talk about.”
Twilight was still smiling, but I could see her slightly raise an eyebrow. “Are you sure this has nothing to do with magic?”
“Positive!” I answered, “It’s just… okay, I’m just going to rip the bandage off. How do you feel about me?”
Twilight only looked more perplexed. “I think you’re a really good friend, and I’m very proud of the person you’ve become in just a year’s time,” she answered confidently.
I smiled, but I shook my head. “No, no. I know that – thank you, by the way, that means a lot – but I mean… how do you feel about me?”
“I’m… not really sure I understand the question.” Twilight’s smile gradually faded into a confused frown. I guess I should have figured she’d be this oblivious to questions with vague underlying meanings. As different as she may be from my Twilight, she’s still a Twilight.
“What I mean is: if I were to ask you out right now, what would you say?”
Twilight pursed her lips as her eyes went wide. Then she looked off to the side. “You mean like… out on a date?”
“More or less, yeah.” I nodded and smiled awkwardly.
Twilight began to bounce her leg as her eyes darted around the room. The embarrassment washing through me could be felt down to my core, but I just had to know. I wanted to shout “You can just say no!”, but as much as I knew that would be the answer, I didn’t want to sway her.
“I mean… I-I guess… umm…” she stammered.
“Here, if it makes it any easier for you, I’m not asking you on a date right now,” I stated. I thought this would ease her into the question, but she only seemed to get frustrated.
“What do you mean, you’re not?! Why would you drop a question on me like that and not mean it?” she protested.
The offense in her voice made me flinch. I tried my best to ask that as rhetorically as possible, yet she still took it as literally as she could.
I held my hands up in front of me and smiled at her sheepishly. “I’m just asking hypothetically. I promise there’s a good reason for this, but I want to hear your unbiased answer before I tell you why I’m asking.”
To my surprise, she looked at the ground. Her expression looked a little dejected. I wanted to say something comforting, but I wasn’t sure what to say at all. Why would she react like that anyway? It’s not like she was about to say–
“I… I’d probably say yes, I guess,” she muttered.
My eyes went wide and my jaw dropped. “What the fuck?” I immediately felt horrible letting that question out, but it was impossible to hold in. The moment those words slipped past my lips, Twilight gave me another flummoxed look.
“What does that mean?” She sounded even more irritated. “I don't know who ‘the fuck’ is!”
At that moment, it occurred to me that Equestria had not been introduced to the wonderful invention of swearing. I stifled the oncoming hysterical laughter at her question and the following outburst by biting my tongue. Somehow, I managed to choke it back. There’s that bloody taste again.
There were a million words running through my mind afterward, and fishing out the right ones felt impossible for a few moments. I barely managed to scramble a coherent sentence together. “I'm sorry, just… Y-You’d say yes? Like, for real?”
She could tell I was amused by her answer, and this only fed her frustration. Twilight scowled at me, a blush now splashed across her face. “Is this hypothetical or not?! Are you going to keep playing with my emotions or can you just tell me what’s going on already?!” she snapped.
“I’m sorry! I just… this is something I’ve wondered for a while, and I really wasn’t expecting that answer,” I apologized.
“Why not?” she asked.
I stared at her for a moment. What do you mean why not? I thought. Do you not remember blasting me into a crater because I was a bitch? Why would you want to date that?
Once again, summoning the right words was a challenge, but I managed after a few seconds. “First of all, I didn’t know whether you liked girls or not. Secondly, I thought for sure the way we met would have forever made the answer to that question a big, fat no.”
Twilight shook her head and shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never really considered whether or not I have romantic feelings for you. But I’d certainly give you a chance. I don’t really have a preference for any gender, and you’re a completely different pony than the one I met a year ago. So, why not?”
I just started laughing. In the end, I could have saved myself the aforementioned time and heartache. If the other Twilight wasn’t already my girlfriend, I might be upset. Now, this was just hilarious to me. Twilight gave me an awkward laugh in return, but I could tell she was still just as bewildered as when the conversation began.
Finally, after I calmed down, I began to explain everything. “Over the past half a year, I’ve had a huge crush on Twilight from this dimension. It took me forever to finally ask her out, but I finally did a couple weeks ago. It turns out she’s actually gay, and she’s had feelings for me longer than I had ones for her. That's why I'm asking. I wanted to know if you would have answered similarly if I had just asked you from the beginning.”
Twilight shifted expressions multiple times, occasionally opening her mouth only to stop herself from actually saying anything. “If that's the case then… why wouldn't you just ask me how I felt from the beginning?”
I looked around the room awkwardly. “Well, barring all the differences between the two of you and the dimensions as a whole, there’s one big reason I never did.”
“And that is…?” she inquired.
“That would be cheating,” I answered with a smirk.
Her brow furrowed for a moment, but then her expression relaxed into a smile. “I’m not going to lie, this is the most profoundly weird thing anyone has ever told me.”
I smiled at her awkwardly.
“That said, I’ve got all afternoon. Why don’t you fill me in on how it all happened?” she asked.
I chuckled and took a deep breath. “Well, it all started one night at Pinkie’s when I woke up around 2 AM. You see, ever since you were here for the Battle of the Bands, I’ve had this really specific habit that only happens under incredibly and equally specific circumstances…”