Hello, this is my written blog, recommendation from my dear psychologist. My name is Ellis, and my true name is classified for safety reasons to protect my family and my homeland. I am a human, a 16 years old male teenager, and I am writing this letter from the School of Friendship of Twilight Sparkle, in Equestria.
You may wonder, who are you? Do I care? And before that, let me explain why I am here.
Three years ago, when I was 14, a project was started called “Bridges of Friendship”. A project meant to connect two different worlds through the selection of one human student, to be sent to Equestria and learn about friendship.
I signed for it just for the laughs, since the chances to be selected were ridiculously low.
What? You don't believe me? Then guess how many students signed.
One hundred thousand? Wrong.
Five million? Try again.
One hundred million? Multiply it by nine
Yeah, it was THAT low. I'm not joking when I say the chances are ridiculously low, since even North Korean students signed for it. The thought of being selected felt so mystic, so… Unreal, that our fantasies about Equestria started to get wild, saying that it was an utopia, or a place like in the Harry Potter novels, or even something like The Elder Scrolls, who knew? And that was the beautiful part, no one knew a thing about Equestria. That made us hope, that there, in the deep darkness of the cosmos, an entity or whatever that lies there, helped us move the destiny threads to be the lucky one to be selected.
I still remember it like yesterday, how we had to perform A LOT of tests, from mathematics to physical abilities, everything measurable in a human student got measured. A whole month doing tests, after a year, we got the results.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I almost got a heart attack when two guys in suits arrived at our house, knocked on the door, and took my family to a place where we got informed that I got selected to be the student that would go to Equestria. My mom was extremely proud of me, so was my dad when he knew, and I was barely aware at the moment, with my brain feeling in static, and my heart bumping a million beats a second.
And here comes one of the most exciting, yet, terrifying moments of my life. My mom and I signed the clauses, and then I got undressed, and had to stay like that for months, because we got moved to a place filled to the brim with medical devices. For three long months I had to undergo a long medical process, having every single part of my body tested, checked, and keeping me as healthy as possible, putting me all the vaccines needed, and the worst one - a huge needle that inserted a microchip in my arm.
When I wasn't being tested, I got dressed with paper tunics, and got laid in a stretcher, with sterilized sheets, with electrodes all over my body. It felt like science-fiction. It felt like those weird alien torture scenes in 80’s or 90’s movies.
But nevertheless, I wasn't scared at all. Even with the lumbar puncture, a horror movie sized needle getting into my spine wasn't able to kill my excitement to arrive in Equestria, and if this was required for me to get there, so be it then.
And I finally arrived here. It wasn't what I was expecting, and that was marvelous. Seeing all those creatures from a fairy-tale was amazing. Unicorns, Pegasi, a Griffin, a Hippogriff, and even a Yak that could talk, all of this was amazing, until I got stuck with the first reality check.
I'm not magic, at all. Even a mule has more magic than me. That means that no matter how hard a creature tries a spell on me, I won't work. A researcher warned me about this, and at first I didn't care too much because I was still able to talk to these creatures! And here I am, having to learn a pony language called Ponish to talk to, of course, ponies. I've made some progress, and I was able to not require help from teachers directly or a device to translate everything for me. The device could talk, but the shame of being so different, so INSANELY different made me prefer to stay silent, and just translate from speech or image to text.
Headmare Twilight explained to me that in this school there's a passive spell casted permanently, that allows every creature here to know what everyone is saying, everyone except me by, of course, not being magic. Since magic can not flow through my body or my atoms, my brain can not really get synthetic synapsis that translates everything to my native language, and neither with other creatures, and that's why I gotta learn Ponish.
Ponish is weird, it looks like Arabic, is written like Japanese - a syllabary -, but is spoken like a weird version of English mixed with Russian and German, or I don't know, is too unique to be exactly compared to any known human language.
That was a bit troubling for itself, but then another reality check arrived, and I can confidently say that this is the worst one. I'm totally isolated from Earth. You see, in Equestria, time passes differently from Earth. Each second here are two on earth. May seem a little, but when a month passes here, on Earth passes two. The same happens with years. I think you can already deduce that communication between worlds is not exactly fast, neither easy, so any message must be through pre recorded videos, and I reply to them with other pre recorded videos. The problem is, the time of response.
I could easily deal with it if it were a week or two. But the response times could be from one month, to even a whole trimester!! And a whole trimester here is a whole semester there, and this makes it insanely hard to keep up with knowing what's going on back at home.
I already lost two entire Christmases, two birthdays with my family, and of course just enjoying time with them. I used to take my parents for granted, but now that they're not here, I miss them so much, and I feel that if I ever see them again, I will break instantly. Even now thinking about them makes my eyes get wet.
Then another reality check… If Equestrian studies aren't enough, I still gotta keep up with Earth studies. This means that during my free time, I gotta spend it studying the streamlined scholar curriculum from my school, and perform tests to get graded and graduate with an earthling license when I finish here too.
I barely have time for myself, and the fact that I can not talk to anyone here makes me want to give up and ask for my replacement. But I can't, and neither want. I saw my parents’ faces when I got selected. So I imagine their faces when I get back there.
Then another annoyance is the fact that under my clothes, I have a device linked with my microchip and also with a sensor that takes my vital signs. The device is attached to my chest with waterproof glue, and is extremely strong. It only comes out with a special mixture, and I have to get it replaced every two weeks when I go back to the small base in a rented house in Ponyville. I know there must be a bigger, hidden base somewhere near the portal, and from where my special supplies come from.
There's also the fact that here, tests are so diverse, and maybe for native creatures here that's amazing, or normal. I don't really know how education works here. The thing is, tests come very often, and that wouldn't be a problem if I knew how to read Ponish properly. But I can't, I wish I could be a language prodigy and learn this language in a matter of weeks, but I can't. I don't even know why I got selected.
I'm not strange to being tested often since my previous school was one with credited excellence, but the thing in those cases was the fact I had an idea on what was going on, or what the test was about. But when it comes to Pony history, it is literally learning from zero. Again, it is way harder without native control of the local language.
The same with friendship activities. I often get excluded because I'm “scary”. A detail I didn't mention is that I'm twice taller than a pony, and well, the fact that I don't have a pastel color palette and my hair that only grows longer and longer since I don't have a human stylist yet.
I'm tired all the time, and yet I have to smile to not concern or scare anyone, since I still have problems communicating. I know I should feel lucky for being here, and I see my dad already telling me that I'm a snowflake for complaining about this stuff. But I really feel overwhelmed. I'm in the literal school of friendship, and yet I feel so alone and isolated.
I felt blessed when I got selected, but now I feel alone, but seriously alone. My parents are back at home, and when I finish my studies here, or basically finish the four years left here, back at home a whole decade would have passed, and I would lose it. A decade that I won't be able to know if my parents die, or something happens, maybe even tomorrow a nuclear war starts at home and I won't know until it is too late.
I'll quit here because I'm running out of space, but that's it…
Send best wishes
Ellis.
(I don't know the date since I don't have a calendar here, and I feel too tired to go get one)