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// Pink and True 
// Story: Timed Ramblings 
// by Midnight herald 
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	I can taste the morning breeze. It’s yellow, it’s sunshine and sour and falling stars. I can taste the tears of yesterday, and laughter of nightclubs rustles my feathers as I soar above town. I can see the footsteps of the ponies down below me, as I look down. They shine out like starbursts, like little fireworks of noise and blueberries and a distant, thundering applause. The sun sings its happy little song, so warm and joyful, reverent, a hymn to life and love in greens and purples. But I listen beyond sunshine, I look through the firework horseshoes, I dodge past loose scraps of conversation that rustle the air around me. I don’t care about them. I’m too busy looking for her.

She’s the only one in this town that’s true. She sounds how she looks how she smells how she is, and it’s why I love her. She doesn’t know that yet, but maybe she does. It’s always hard to say with other ponies, even if they’re like her. Even if they mean what they are what they feel what they say, like she does. 

Some days I think she understands me. Other days I hope she doesn’t, hope she never will. Other ponies never understand me, no matter how they try. Other ponies get all jumbled up, and run away when I try to explain. Or they say what they don’t look or smell or sound, and I get confused. I don’t let other ponies get near me much, right now. They make my eyes spin and my head cry and my wings wail and my hair squirm and my skin dance away. They send their huckleberry regrets and violet lies all flying around me until I don’t know which way is up anymore. Until I don’t know which way is true or right or mine.

But right now that way is towards her, towards the one thing that’s true in this town, the one thing that’s real anymore, that’s constant. She’s pink. She tastes it, laughs it, looks it. Pink and nothing else, and beautiful in her joyful simplicity. All different shades of pink, of joy and sadness, with too much energy or not enough, but she’s always there. She’s always pink. She’s always smiling. I see her, angle my wings and land with a loud puff of dust, sending green giggles into the air as I snap the dust from my grey, tired feathers and manage a little grin.

And she’s smiling back, all rhubarb and cardamom and home, pink like the gentle sunsets you get in a desert. And I try to say hello but my words have gotten all tangled in my saddlebags and I don’t know how to straighten them out. But she’s grinning and so mothing else really matters as I show her just how happy I am that she’s here. I can taste the silence in the crowd around us as I give her a hug. It’s all heavy-cream and garlic, curdled and sun-spoiled and greasy. My wings wrap around her broad back and my neck plays chime bells against hers. I wait for the rotten silence to slide off my back before I open my eyes and try so desperately for them both to meet hers. Her eyes are vast oceans, sun-kissed island waters of the purest blue, but her shy little smile still smells pink. It’s still her, it always is.

I can taste her lips against mine. They’re spicy velvet, a symphony of thrushes and humid as the swamp air, twice as heavy, weighing down on my dizzy brain. And then they’re gone, and she’s smiling again, as bright a pink as the royal rose garden, and her hooves are tapping out a sonnet in morse code. My own chest answers in an iambic duet, thrumming like a hummingbird two stories tall.

Shocked gasps circle us in the moldy dust, but I don’t really care. I’m not surprised. I never let ponies touch me, nopony but her. But she’s true, she’s real, and she’s laughing. And my words are still all scattered through undelivered mail and my morning snack, and I can’t think straight, with the looks the other ponies on the street are giving me, the ones that tickle down my spine, snake-like and spidery and skittering, but it’s okay. 

Because she’s still smiling. She pulls me in, and I can smell her curly pink mane. It smells like midnight, alluring and full of little dancing lights and the sleepy joy of a glass of milk. 

“I love you too, Derpy,” she whispers. Her words massage my ear and run down my skin like dancers, like deer. And I must be yellow, and sunshine and sour and stardust and velvet, because I could float away with the morning breeze right now. I would, but there’s something pink and true and lovely that keeps me grounded, for at least one minute longer.