Gloomy Every Day

by nodamnbrakes

Where do you think you’re going?

High above the earth, a ball made of tightly packed clouds spun through the air and into the hooves of a skinny green pegasus colt. This prompted the other players on his team to cry that they were open, urging him to pass it to them, while those on the opposing team immediately converged on him like a thunderhead. He threw the ball wildly away from himself almost immediately and covered his head with his wings to protect against the impending assault.

The ball missed all of his teammates, was missed by all his opponents, and flew off the roof of the house on which they were playing. It puffed harmlessly against the house next door and dissipated, and the colts all grumbled as one and started arguing over who had to pack a new cloud ball.

Up and down the 'street', other young colts and fillies buzzed around on tiny wings, laughing and enjoying themselves atop the roofs of cloud houses in the afternoon sunlight. It was the kind of day that just begged to be spent outside: warm, sunny, and without a single cloud in the sky, save for the houses themselves and the occasional drifter that had been commandeered to hold a relaxing pegasus. It was so clear, in fact, that anypony standing on a roof would have been able to see the complex patterns of the ground for miles in any direction.

Made of fluffy, well-kept cumulus clouds and oozing rainbows from every fountain, the neighborhood itself seemed both safe and inviting; each house the very picture of a perfect Cloudsdale suburb. The housing was an instance of that sort of ticky-tacky arrangement where every single house was almost exactly the same as the ones around it. Mares could sit together and gossip while their children played, before them, watchful but not worried. This, all told, was a nearly flawless environment many pegasi would have killed to see their foals grow up in.

In fact, there was only one house that truly stood out in a negative way, and that was primarily because it was the only one that didn’t look well-kept and cared for. Compared to the other houses, it was quite dilapidated, with the more complex cloud formations starting to lose their shapes a little bit. The outside of the dwelling had long ago been modified and customized somewhat to reflect the owner’s personality in the form of a pillar of lightning crackling to the right of the ornately designed front door. It would have been quite nice to look at if there hadn’t been an identical, but non-functional due to neglect, one on the other side. The working one itself occasionally sputtered and weakened, showing that it, too, was on the verge of failure.

Some ponies avoided the house because of its unsightly state. Most preferred, for the most part, to pretend it wasn't as poorly kept up as it actually was—though many of the foals gave it unsure looks from time to time, and a few gazed at the door as though waiting for somepony to come out.

Nopony did come out, of course. The house’s only resident hadn’t left in days.

Lightning Dust lay in her cloud bed with the sheets pulled up to her chest, staring blankly at the ceiling. Though she really wanted to go block out the sunlight beaming in onto her through the window, she simply never had the energy to go get the blackout curtains she kept in the attic—ones she’d gotten as part of a window set but never used before, because until five or six months ago she hadn’t felt any desire to lay in the pitch darkness and do nothing.

She blinked a few times, then laboriously reached up to wipe at her face with her hoof and get the crusty buildup out of her red-rimmed eyes. For several hours—at the very least—since waking up, she’d been in this position, just as she'd been every day for countless days, and days, and days. A part of her yearned to get up and do something that was worth doing, but the other part just wanted to seal herself away from the world as much as she possibly could, and just forget how to feel.

A shadow passed by her window—probably a colt playing ball, or maybe something else, or maybe even just her imagination; she didn't have the energy or the will to verify it, anyway—and she flinched and turned her eyes away from the light, to the nauseating state of the actual room in which she dwelled. Garbage littered the floor, as did a couple of upturned magazines and the occasional half-read book about pegasus aerodynamics.

Some awful, rotten smell permeated throughout the whole house, though Lightning suspected most of it was coming from the kitchen and not the greasy trash scattered around. In any case, fixing it would have meant putting effort she didn't have into doing an activity, so she just idly rested a hoof on her nose to block out some of the smell.

Sighing, she looked back at the window, which, as always, seemed so blindingly bright compared to the gloom of her house. Then she dared to glance at her clock, something she'd been avoiding for a long time:

1:26, it read, in rebar-straight, blood-red digital letters. After this was a barely visible little PM in the lower right side. One twenty-six in the afternoon.

When she'd awoken, it had been something like ten thirty, which meant that Lightning had been laying in bed doing nothing for almost three hours. Having wasted so much of her time on lethargic inactivity, she finally came to the conclusion that she needed to suck it up, get out of bed, and get going about her day—or what passed for a day, in any case.

Lightning unenthusiastically pushed the bedcovers off her body, moving slowly because her body seemed unwilling to cooperate with her commands beyond the most basic motions. Eventually, she slithered out of bed, shivering slightly. It was abnormally cold in her room—and that was why, aside from the irritating sunlight, she'd had the blanket pulled up so far in the middle of the summer.

That the sun was blaring through the blinds did little to warm the house. It seemed chronically cold no matter where she went. Lightning really wouldn’t have been surprised if the clouds the room was made of soon began to turn to ice with the way things were going. In fact, her whole house was freezing cold whenever she tried to slog through it; another reason she didn’t want to get up.

The floor was covered in a thin mist up to her knees, which was probably the main reason for the cold: it wasn't so much that it was cold as that everything was wet all the time. The mist was the result of Lightning's poor record of keeping up her home in the last half a year: since she hadn’t bothered repacking the clouds like she ought to have done four months or so ago, they were beginning to come apart. As she made her way across the worst part of the decaying floor, Lightning made a mental note to repack the clouds.

Today.

In a few hours.

Or maybe tomorrow.

Later.

By the time she lurched into the bathroom and relieved herself, Lightning’s hooves were soaked by the fine mist. They were, therefore, the only part of her body that had been touched by water in any significant way for days. The rest, including her chronically unpreened feathers, shone with a layer of grease and filth. Her mane hung in front of her face like strands of rotten gamboge spaghetti, forcing her to stop and push locks of it away from her face to clear her vision every so often.

Lightning stood in front of the bathroom sink and reluctantly critiqued herself in the mirror as she did on every one of the days when she managed to get out of bed. The sickening creature that stared back was hardly recognizable as a form of her own, and yet it fit what she'd become so perfectly that it was almost physically painful.

Dark rings discoloured the area beneath her eyes, which were sunken slightly and quite glazed. In kind, Lightning’s greasy, unwashed coat had lost much of the vibrant intensity it had had once upon a time, making her look almost as ill as she felt. The sickness wasn't really a tangible one for which she could have rattled off symptoms of to a doctor. Rather, it was a disgusting, noxious malaise, like her head was filled with cotton, and her body had been injected with enough lead to weigh her straight through the decaying floor.

Blinking, Lightning tried to get the zipping sprites of light out of her vision, but they defiantly continued to dart around when she focused on the white cloud wall behind her in the mirror. She shook her head from side to side a couple of times, and ultimately abandoned the attempt and turned away.

After washing her hooves, she looked to the shower for a second and tried to summon up the will to step into it. There was actually a very strong argument in favor of her doing so, at least logically: for one thing, she could literally smell her own body odor, having not washed in days. For another, she’d once been rather obsessive when it came to her appearance and keeping clean, and that feeling of filthiness that came with not showering for so long hadn’t changed despite her rapidly deteriorating hygienic habits.

But try as she might, Lightning just couldn't make the hot water seem inviting enough for her to want to step under it. The rewards of taking a shower weren't equal to or greater than the comparatively enormous amount of effort she'd have to put into doing so. In the end, she decided she was going to take a shower... later. It might be more inviting later, when the hot water actually seemed appealing. At the moment, it just felt like she would end up washing herself for hours without actually getting any of the dirt—both physical and mental—off. And so she left the bathroom again without washing herself at all.

She'd take one that evening before bed, she promised herself.

Or tomorrow, or the next day.

Some other time.

Later.

Though she wasn’t truly hungry, she shuffled out into the kitchen and looked around for something to eat, more as a matter of rote and sheer boredom than anything else. There wasn’t much in terms of food, as she hadn’t gone shopping in almost a week, but she was usually able to find some soggy cornflakes or questionably ripe fruit she’d missed.

That, or something like the chocolate cake she’d bought for her own birthday months ago. Her birthday had been celebrated by sleeping all day and crying during the night, and ignoring the letters her friends and family sent to her because it was just too painful to read message after message telling her they hoped she'd 'feel better soon'. The cake had remained untouched until she'd found it again weeks later—stale, still in her saddlebag by the front door—and eaten it all in one sitting.

Lightning, in spite of her sporadic diet, had gained several pounds since she’d left the Wonderbolts Academy. Not that she was overweight or completely out of shape—each day, she did do a few laps around her exercise room upstairs, before the fatigue and numbness caught up with her and she went crashing back into her bed. But her wings were noticeably less muscular, their once obsessively preened feathers uncared for to the point of moulting out prematurely, and the rest of her body had a small layer of fat on it that hadn't been there before. Overall, she looked and felt like a washout; a once great mare who’d lost what made her just that. A had-been, pining after the days when she'd had something to look forward to as a future instead of more days trapped in her bed, sniffling over nothing.

After a lot of wandering aimlessly around, rechecking places she’d already looked in for edible food, she finally made herself some toast, which she unenthusiastically nibbled at once it was finished. It was nearly tasteless, and she had to force herself to swallow it, but Lightning’s brain demanded that she eat to stave off the sickening, perversive boredom that tended to come with inactivity. In the end, she practically soaked her food with mustard—the only condiment she had in her refrigerator that hadn’t gone bad—while drinking a glass of water she’d gotten from the tap in order to get rid of the dryness. It was a disgusting meal, all in all.

A distant thump dragged her attention to the hallway as she finished her 'meal'. Lightning blinked stupidly in its direction, wondering if it was worth the effort to get up and go see what it was. In the end, she decided that it would be better to find out if she was being robbed or having her home invaded than to sit around and let her things be stolen—she couldn’t afford that, after all. She’d probably have to start selling things to pay her bills eventually, though she strongly preferred to not think about it.

With a heavy sigh, she got up and shuffled up the hall to the door. This was the only place where the four shafts of light coming through the door’s window pane seemed to be even remotely real, and not just an illusion. They were still a bit muffled anyway by the thin cloud of mist rising from the floor, which only added to the feeling of gloom about the house.

Sitting in the center of this four-shafted little spotlight was a small pile of new mail. The thump she had heard probably wasn't related to the mail, which usually came much earlier in the day; it was more likely a colt's cloudball hitting her door and dissipating. At any rate, Lightning's short attention span quickly shifted from the noise to the mail, and she ceased to care about it. She picked the mail up, tucked it under her wing, and made the journey back to her foul-smelling kitchen to sort through it.

The first letter was a bill. The moment she realized this, Lightning tossed it onto the counter without reading it any further. It landed in a pile of other mail she’d not felt like opening or reading in the last week or two. This process was repeated for the second and third letters, which were another bill and an advertisement, respectively, until she reached the fourth, which had a neat, hoof-written address on it instead of a typed one. Lightning recognized the hoofwriting as belonging to one of her friends, and the return address was that of a bookstore in the earth pony town on the ground near where she lived.

Inside, there was a letter in the same hoofwriting.

Dear Lightning,

I don’t know if you’re going to read this, but I hope you do. I just want to let you know that the girls and I are getting together to throw a party for Inkie’s birthday on the thirteenth. It’s at the store, with just the five of us. Nothing big. You know she doesn’t like high-profile celebrations when they’re about her. You’re welcome to come, if you want.

We all miss you terribly. There’s a new pegasus delivering the mail down here, but I keep expecting you to fly through my window in the morning and give me my mail again. Nopony here understands why you stopped going to work, or why you won’t come down and visit. I’d visit you, you know, but I don’t have wings. I did find a spell to give a pony temporary wings, but I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough at magic to cast it. But back on topic, we’d all appreciate it if you came to Inkie’s birthday party. You’ve been locked up in your house for so long, and we miss you so much, Lightning. It would mean a lot to all of us if you were to—

Unwilling to read further, as it would have forced her to deal with the anxiety it produced, Lightning folded up Morning's letter and put it carefully on the counter. She tapped her hoof anxiously on it a few times, then moved away from it.

Tears began to form in her eyes as she thought about her friends, and about how they were probably wondering what was the matter with her when even she couldn’t understand it, and how she’d taken away what little she had to offer them just because she was so pathetic that she could hardly even get out of bed in the morning.

Then again, Morning was probably just writing out of a sense of obligation. Lightning hadn’t seen her in months, and she doubted Morning really still considered her a friend. The same was true for her other friends, too. Besides, who in their right mind would ever want to keep being friends with a useless, arrogant waste of a pegasus who spent all her time either sleeping, crying, or lamenting her expulsion from the Wonderbolts Academy anyway?

No longer hungry—not that she'd really been physically hungry to begin with—and wanting nothing more than to get far away from that letter and the tension it caused her, she wandered around the hall a bit until she found herself slowly ascending the stairs to the second floor. She limped and swayed a bit with every step, her body unwilling to actually put effort into getting her from one point to another.

At first, she'd planned to go up and work out, as she'd once done on a regular schedule every morning. That it was the middle of the day didn't matter. A small voice in the back of her head kept insisting that she had to keep herself on a schedule, and that if she could just get back into a routine, she would feel better. It was not, however, her little personal gym that she ended up going to. No, there was only one place she could possibly head when she felt this bad.

All in all, her new destination was probably the worst place for her to go when she was upset, by far. Lightning hated the room with all the muted passion she was still capable of mustering. But it called to her, like a perverted inverse of the appeal the sky once held for her. She couldn’t stop her own pathetic march towards the room at the end of the landing after she topped the last step into the second floor hallway; couldn't stop herself from pushing that door open, thoughts of exercise forgotten in the haze.

It was once a trophy room, filled with the golden exploits of a vain pegasus whose life was once dedicated to proving that she could outdo everypony else without even breaking a sweat. Wall-to-wall shelves held the dozens—hundreds—of awards Lightning Dust had accumulated throughout her life; it was a place she’d once visited each morning to show herself that she was good enough, and that she was a winner, that she was one step closer to her ultimate goal with each day that passed.

Now it served as nothing more than a reminder of how far she’d fallen, and why. In particular, there was a spot there that she was pulled towards; something that she felt compelled to look at every time she entered the room; something that overshadowed everything else there. The dishonorable discharge notice from the Wonderbolts was pinned to the wall in the spot where she’d intended to put her letter of acceptance onto the team; this was also the place where the line of awards abruptly ended, with nothing more added in months. Lightning stood in front of it, staring emptily and silently at the document that had essentially ruined her.

An unpleasant feeling of being watched—even though she also felt more alone than she’d ever felt in her life—had followed her throughout the entire house as she went about what passed for her daily routine, and in this room it was the most powerful of all. Years of demands weighed her down; every award in the room screamed at her that she was a failure, that she'd ruined everything she had won those trophies for, that she had somehow become defective, ineffective, and pathetic where she'd once been the best.

The unstoppable horror that lurked in the shadows, and also within Lightning herself, had been born here. It was an awful, vicious thing that lived everywhere in her house and clung to her like plastic wrap every moment of her life for the last few months, waking or asleep. She could almost taste its malevolent presence around her in the epicenter of its power.

But that, and any other acknowledgement, was only an almost, not a full realization of it through any of her senses. How, after all, was she to acknowledge something that wasn't really there at all? It seemed to be omnipresent and yet not present at all, somehow, as though it were already permeating Lightning herself and warping the way she experienced her surroundings. The whole idea was simply too complex and confusing for her to handle, and she soon forced the whole notion out of her mind.

Instead of thinking, or even feeling, she stared blankly at the discharge notice for several minutes straight, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, until she remembered that she needed to continue the parody of a daily routine she’d fallen into. Leaving the disgusting room behind at last, Lightning went back out into the hall and continued up to the third floor of her house.

This entire floor, which had originally been an attic, had been converted into an exercise room when she’d been at the height of her training for the Wonderbolts Academy and had needed a personal gym that badly. Almost all of the equipment was abandoned and untouched by now—just another reminder of her failure, thousands of bits wasted on a dream she couldn’t achieve, and Lightning just couldn’t find the will to let any of it go, even though she didn’t use it anymore.

On a good day before the Academy, she’d been able to fly hundreds of laps around the room without stopping, stinking it up so badly with sweat that she needed to air it out afterward. The windows were shut tight and the blinds drawn now, so it was a good thing—in a way—that she could only manage a few dozen halfhearted laps. Even when she started to get her blood pumping, that cold void feeling inside her stayed unwarmed.

Further hampering her exercise was the unpleasant claustrophobic feeling that came from being inside the partially darkened room. Several weeks ago, one of the lightbulbs had burnt out. Although she had some extras downstairs, replacing it wasn’t something she was about to waste energy on, so the room had a dingy feel to it, with shadows dancing around in the corners of Lightning’s eyes no matter where she looked. The stereo she used to play music on had stopped working, so she had only the sound of her sighing to keep her company, and that was little company at all.

She could only stand spending so much of her already vacuously silent day fluttering in circles like a wind-up toy before she gave up and stepped back out, smelling even worse than she had when she began. Already, Lightning felt physically and emotionally drained, and wanted to go back to bed. Flying in circles had done nothing to wake her up, only fueling the thoughts spinning round and round in her head.

Lightning actually paused after closing the door behind her, sat down, and pressed her hooves against her forehead in a futile attempt to push the negativity out. It didn’t work, of course—the dark thoughts and the heaviness inside pushed right back, quickly overpowering Lightning's weak, pitiful form. Eventually, she heaved herself back onto all fours and went downstairs again.

The sheer force of the smell hit her rather hard when she reached the first floor, since she’d let her guard down for a little while upstairs. It was worse than she’d realized, despite having grown accustomed to it; a sickly sweet stench of decay that made her stomach churn. Finally, as she gagged and tried her best not to throw up, Lightning decided she needed to clean her house a little bit.

Pausing in the kitchen doorway, she surveyed the room. It was an absolute mess, like an amplified edition of the way the rest of her home had become over the months. A bag of trash, sitting beside the overflowing bin, was likely the source of the foul smell. It was either that or the sewer that used to be her sink, where the drain was clogged up and the water was probably at least several days old. Unwashed dishes were piled up in it, some still with bits of rotting food in them.

Lightning didn’t get around to unclogging the drain, though, because her attention remained fixed on the table—specifically, on the mess of half-folded papers littering the tabletop or buried under her almost empty cereal bowl. These were all bills, and they reminded her of something even more unpleasant: before she even cleaned up the house, she was going to have to make sure she would even continue to own it; a morbidly daunting task in itself.

She had attempted to do her bills a while back and had never cleaned up the mess, only making a little dent in the haphazardly piled notices and envelopes. In the end, she’d paid off exactly nothing, because she’d lost her job long ago due to excessive absences and so had no money to pay them with. She was already deep in debt to pay for the Academy, had little chance or interest in getting a new job, and just couldn’t deal with the payment notices and bills and all that stuff she wasn’t supposed to be up to her neck in at the age of twenty-five.

It had just been too much, the stress of breaking down in the middle of her job delivering the mail—delivering it to her friends, no less—and having to explain why she kept taking days off to lay in bed and cry when she herself didn't even understand why she did it; of seeing the huge sums she owed and realizing that she was never going to be free of her massive debt, that she'd always be halving her money to pay for the event that had destroyed her future...

With all this in mind, Lightning wasn't even sure how to begin to fix the collapsing tunnel to hell that her life had become, so she chose to leave it be. Looking at the pile of bills to be sorted out simply overwhelmed her in the same way staring at the discharge notice had done, viciously breaking her will to do anything constructive. And so, after halfheartedly putting some garbage on top of the overflowing bin and rearranging a few papers, Lightning told herself she'd done something worthwhile and left the kitchen to fester.

But it was fine. She'd find a way to fix it all. Eventually.

Some other time.

Maybe tomorrow.

Later.

Instead of cleaning the kitchen, she wandered around the house for a bit, trying to come up with some way to make her day worthwhile without actually expending a significant amount of energy. She eventually ended up staring listlessly at her rumpled, disheveled bed as she wondered whether it was worth it to change the sheets.

There were crumbs all over it from the times she’d sleepwalked out and gotten cereal or toast in the middle of the night—partly a product of her completely messed-up sleep cycle and part a product of her bizarre impulses to eat things when she wasn't actually hungry. It was certainly uncomfortable and rather disgusting to sleep in a bed filled with stains and food crumbs. On the other hoof, Lightning had no more clean sheets, and she desperately didn’t want to do a wash, period. It would have taken effort, and time that she could have spent doing absolutely nothing productive.

With little enthusiasm, she reached out and tugged the nearest pillow off the top of the bed, indifferently discarding it on the floor behind her. The other one lay at the opposite end of the bed, as Lightning tended to hug it against her chest when she was sleeping or crying particularly hard, and sometimes when she just didn't want to accept that she was awake. This pillow joined the other one on the floor after a few moments.

The blanket was bunched up against the wall, where it always ended up when she slept for more than a few hours. She took it and dumped it on top of the pillows, and it spilled out of her hooves in a manner that was disturbingly similar to clotted blood pouring from a wound. Shivering in subconscious disgust—yet at the same time, somehow too numb to truly feel that disgust or care very much at all—Lightning dragged the topsheet off the bed, then the other sheet, leaving it stripped.

It was rather surprising how clean, neat, uniform, and white the mattress was after she’d spilled a glass of peach juice on the sheets weeks ago—which was also the last time she’d changed them. The white, in fact, was so painfully sterile that Lightning couldn’t help but turn away from it.

Eventually, she busied herself searching the pile of dirty laundry—bedclothes, track suits, a set of wing warmers from back in the middle of the winter, socks—for a set of sheets that didn’t smell too bad. Though it would have taken her little effort to bring the overflowing basket down into the basement, it was an effort she simply lacked the will to put forth anymore. That, and she wanted to cover up the overly sterile mattress so that it matched the rotting, bland decor of the rest of her home as soon as possible. Putting ‘new’ sheets on wouldn't help it look any more inviting—Lightning had spent far too much time lying in it and crying for her to ever find any measure of comfort laying in it again—but it at least lessened the irritating sense of a large bar of soap sitting in a cesspit in front of her.

After she finished changing the sheets, Lightning dragged herself out into the living room, exhausted from that single, simple chore. She collapsed onto the sofa without bothering to turn on the light, put her face in her hooves for a moment, and sighed wearily. Then, as the psychic exhaustion really started to catch up with her again, she lay down sideways on it and stared at the blackened screen of the television set with glazed eyes.

Only a few short hours—if even that—had passed since she'd gotten out of bed, and already she'd run out of things to occupy herself with. The thought of watching television crossed her mind, but she couldn't think of anything that she'd actually want to watch. The same was true of her video games: Lightning had played all the ones she would have enjoyed, so the idea failed to interest her in the slightest. Flying, exercising, cleaning, masturbating, crying—none of these things brought anything but a sort of empty greyness to her anymore; the same empty grey void that she dwelt in all the time, where every little thing was at one unbearably painful and yet also utterly without feeling.

It was a terrible sensation to realize, as she seemed to do every day, that she had nothing worth any effort at all; to know that she was sitting around and wasting the best years of her life, with no motivation to do anything at all except sleep. And yet, somehow, she was too numb to truly react to it all, even as frustrated tears began to fall from her eyes. Lightning was angry now, angry at her life and the world and herself, but even that was ultimately muted, pitiful, and impotent.

She knew she needed to do something, but there was simply nothing left to do that felt like it would take some of the pain away. It all seemed so completely pointless. Every single attempt she made to come up with a potential way to burn time enjoyably only led to an increasingly frustrating sense of meaninglessness. Whatever she thought of, no matter what it was instantaneously cancelled out by ever more unpleasant rationalizations.

Her gym membership still had a couple of days left on it, if she remembered correctly—Lightning hadn’t been there for several months, so she didn’t know for sure. And she hadn’t really wanted to fly for a while, but maybe what she needed was a larger environment to spread her wings. For a moment, there was in her mind’s eye a fleeting memory of her soaring through the sky, and she almost wanted to get up and do it again—but she didn’t.

There were still some flying books upstairs that Lightning hadn’t even read yet, but she didn’t feel like reading. Though there was undoubtedly food somewhere in the kitchen, she didn’t feel like eating. There were two dozen places in her house she could have spent time cleaning or fixing, but she didn’t have the willpower to clean them, especially not after she'd used up so much of her precious energy making her bed. She could have played ball with the neighborhood colts, but she couldn’t bring herself to get up and go see if there was still a game going on and she didn't feel like listening to their gleeful giggles anyway. Lightning could have cried, but she struggled to keep the tight lump in her throat from erupting into tears yet again, as it sometimes did lately. Sleep might have helped, but she didn’t even want to sleep.

Lightning didn’t want to do anything at all.

Turning, she got one of the couch pillows in hooves and hugged it against her chest, already feeling tears prickling at the corners of her eyes again. It was a poor substitute for equine contact, which Lightning had no real desire for anyway—and yet she was desperate for something, anything, that would relieve the oppression weighing down on her. Unfortunately, it was such a poor substitute that it hardly did anything besides make her feel even more lonely. She felt pathetic, lying there on her aging sofa with her coat and feathers greased with filth, something that added an even greater tinge of shame and self-loathing to her misery.

Part of her knew that she had so much to do, and that was part of the reason she was avoiding it. The bills on her table spun around in her head, mixing with images of the lazy, fat, washed-up excuse for a pegasus she was becoming, and memories of a time when she had been so much more than that. When something at all had felt like it mattered to her, whether it was her now-defunct dream of one day being the captain of the Wonderbolts or the silly little contests she flew just to hear the crowd yell her name.

Maybe, she thought to herself after some fruitless consideration of her current state, I could go to Inkie’s birthday party. Maybe that would help me feel a bit better. I just need to spend some time around other ponies...

She still had friends, didn’t she? Morning Glory, Pepper, Shuttercap, the others… they still wrote to her. But she knew it was out of a sense of obligation and concern for her, not because they wanted to talk to her. Lightning couldn't really imagine somepony wanting to spend time around her mopey, lethargic self anyway. And she herself had some trouble thinking of anypony she’d actually want to spend the whole day, or even five minutes, with: they were her friends, yes, but they would surely get bored of her whining within minutes. Though she might not have been the nicest or most likable pegasus in Equestria—in fact, she knew that she was hardly likable at all; a dumb, egotistical loser if she was really honest with herself—the least she could do for the ponies who'd overlooked her glaring faults for so long was to not force them to deal with her.

But maybe that was what she was missing now. Maybe it was what had sustained her for so long: the praise, the admiration, and the appreciation that she'd never deserved. Perhaps all she needed to do was pull a couple of badass stunts in front of her best friends and know that she was still able to impress them; to hear their hollow praise for her subpar abilities once again. Maybe her ego just needed to be reinflated to the disgusting levels it had once grown to.

Maybe it wasn't even that complicated.

Lightning was so lonely, so miserable trapped by herself in a house where she could only listen to her own hoofsteps and her own sniffling. In fact, she couldn't even remember a time when she'd gone through her own front door in over a week, save for taking out the trash.

One of her theories a couple of months ago had been that maybe she wasn’t getting enough sunlight, and that was why she felt so terrible all the time. Although that idea had been all but debunked after she’d spent hours lying on the roof and sunning herself, it emerged for a brief return just then, a last gasp at proving itself true. Anything at all to get out of the house, to live, to make a single day worthwhile.

She desperately wanted things to change, whether that change was the presence of her friends or merely a bit of sunlight on her face. However empty, however pointless the light may have been, it would, at least, have been something for her to strive for. To get away from the cold, the wetness, the awful smell, the crushing silence and the sense that she was being watched and judged by everything that she'd ever been... To be free. To have the weight lifted away from her belly, to be able to smile, laugh, and enjoy life again—these were the things she needed, begged for in the corners of her mind, more than anything else.

She needed to go outside and have a life again, and be somepony—and then, maybe everything would return to normal, and she’d feel better and stop sleeping all the time. And maybe then the world would stop seeming like it was all continuously collapsing on top of her, and like her future had become a black hole packed with nothing but inevitable disappointments, and like her heart had been ripped out and replaced with a ball of lead.

Yes, she thought, with a sudden, quite unusual spark of determination, I'm going to go outside today.

Before she realized what she was doing, Lightning had rolled off the sofa, risen to her hooves, and started shuffling out of the living room and up the hall. A muted sort of excitement, however demented and pitiful, rose inside her, like somepony crying out in joy a thousand miles under the ground because they'd managed to buck the first boulder out of the way.

At first, it seemed like a bad dream when she stepped into the already enormously long front hallway: the hall got longer with each step, and Lightning got correspondingly smaller. The walls swallowed her up, and the light got dimmer and ran from her.

But Lightning was still a stubborn mare; it was, perhaps, the very last and most deeply rooted of her personality traits that hadn't been completely pervaded by the darkness she lived in. She wasn’t a coward, so she kept going, one increasingly anxious, lethargic hoof in front of the other at a time. Even as the dark thoughts she'd briefly thrown off returned, she went on down the impossibly long hallway. She moved on, hoping against hope that she could hang onto this will to live again for just long enough to achieve what she wanted.

The shadows grew darker, and the demented feelings that followed her through them coalesced into something monstrous that blocked her path; a symbol of everything her life had become since she'd left the Wonderbolts Academy. By the time she actually reached the door, Lightning had been reduced to little more than a cowering roach before the intangible, all-pervading darkness that sat in the sunlight, leering at her as if to say, "Where do you think you’re going?"

And just like that, Lightning stopped, staring blankly at the door with her hoof resting on the doorknob. All the willpower just drained out of her like she'd been poked full of holes and left to bleed dry, and her moment of enthusiasm withered away into despair. That incredibly brief flutter of hope was quickly snuffed out, and her emotions died away into the grey abyss once again. There was, as always, nothing at all. Nothing but emptiness and endless cold. She began to actually think about what she was doing for the first time—and the answers and new questions she came up with were not ones she wanted to hear.

Where, she wondered, was she going to go?

To the Wonderbolts Academy? To try some outlandish and idiotic plan aimed at getting herself back into the program through sheer will to succeed—a will she didn't even have anymore. To visit her friends, who would humor her pathetic whining for a little while but really see nothing but a broken washout of a mare? To the gym, where everypony would wrinkle their noses at her body odor when she shuffled by and laugh when her will failed before she could complete half her routine?

To play cloudball with the local colts—ponies far younger than her who'd probably still outdo her because well she was Lightning Dust and Lightning Dust couldn't do anything right and she always managed to embarrass herself somehow and the sun wouldn't make the cold void go away because it was just a result of her guilt over how pathetic and worthless and stupid and arrogant she was anyway and well that wasn't going to change because that'd be far too easy so why not just stay inside and not have to be reminded of what a failure she was—

She wanted to curl up and cease to exist—not merely to die, but to never have been alive in the first place. To hide in a void, where feelings could not touch her, to be free of that lead weight inside her that was dragging her down into the clouds. Lightning didn't even fully understand why she was so afraid, or what was happening to her, but it was painful nonetheless.

Trembling, Lightning let her hoof slide off the dooknob and stepped back. She was shaking more out of anger than anything else—but there were no screams of rage or denial, no pounding her hooves on the cloud walls as she backed up the hallway. There was only a quiet snuffling when she reached the confines of her rotting kitchen. Lightning collapsed onto her haunches, trying to prevent herself from sobbing while she wiped tears from her cheeks at the same time.

The battle was soon lost, and tears rolled silently down her cheeks. Lightning did finally act on her desire then: she sank down until she was lying on the floor, then curled up and wailed over something she hardly even understood. She wanted to scream, wanted to smash her hooves into whatever she could make them connect with, toss uncleaned pots and pans everywhere, spill the decaying trash all over, and rip up her unpaid bills that would just come again next month with higher numbers on them.

That, however, simply required far too much emotion for her to gather up, and would have meant doing work and summoning the willpower to care. Her outburst was limited to pathetically smacking her hoof against the floor a couple of times, sending up a small bursting puff of mist with each hit. Part of her hoped the rotten floor might give out and let her fall into the sky, where she could spread her wings and escape.

But it was a cloud house, and so it was rather hard to do serious damage to it through anything but neglect. Maybe Lightning would have her revenge when it fell apart another day, but for the time being it would continue to stay together and slowly rot away around her, while she herself remained trapped inside.

She was trapped, and there was nothing she could do about it. And it wasn't even this that she was crying about—no, she was crying about everything that, in total, made her life, and yet she was also unable to identify why any of it upset her at all. There was nothing different about that moment than any other when she wasn't bawling. Even her aborted attempt to escape her prison had failed to impact her day one way or another.

Everything was the same, all the time. The same greyness, the same weight inside, the same unshed tears that only sometimes chose to come forth, and the same hopelessness where Lightning Dust dwelt.

Some immeasurable length of time later, and after wandering around her house for a little while longer without actually accomplishing anything, Lightning dragged herself into her bedroom. Tear tracks stained both sides of her face, her feathers were wildly askew, and she wasn't even bothering to brush her mane out of her face anymore—it was just too much effort, and she was more tired than ever.

The disheveled mare fell onto the blankets with a heavy oof, and spent as little energy as possible digging herself into them. The cold void did not go away even when her body heat warmed the blankets. But at least the cold was familiar to her, and as always she'd managed to numb herself somewhat to it after being filled with it for so long.

She wasn't very sleepy, despite being so very tired in every possible way, but sleep seemed like the least painful option at the moment. As she stared at the wall and tears leaked from her eyes, she wondered when she had begun to feel this way. For some reason, it seemed like Lightning had always been cold and empty and scared; she couldn't remember the sensation of actually feeling hopeful or positive. There were only distant, emotionless memories of brighter times that she knew had been happy, but couldn't recall the happiness itself from.

More importantly, she asked herself, when would she stop feeling this way? If, indeed, she ever would stop feeling this way...

Lightning pulled the blankets up further, cocooning herself in darkness. Her insides still felt like they were all blocked up with ice, but she tried to find some kind of warmth—something to hang onto as a potential hope for the future.

Eventually, she found one such point of warmth, however distorted, immature, and unrealistic it might have been: perhaps if she slept enough and tried as hard as she possibly could to forget about the anguish, it would finally stop tormenting her and leave her alone. That cold void inside her had undeniably won out this time—but maybe, Lightning thought, it would go away tomorrow instead.

Another day.

Some other time.

Later.

But, deep down, she knew it wouldn't.