smile for me if you can
i want to have that in my head
She's pretty sure this is the worst she's ever felt. Worse than sickness, worse than a broken wing; even worse than those rare, fleeting moments of dread, facing down something terrible and powerful that might very well kill her in seconds. She's braved countless monsters, her and her friends. At least she could do something then - buck 'em in the face, show 'em what for, power of harmony and all that. But this… There's nothing to kick, nowhere to fly away to. This is an intangible everything, closing in, wearing her down to a state of near-paralysis, plagued by unbearable memories.
Through it all, she sees that face, everywhere, as burning and inescapable as the twinkling lights of lidded eyes. That face; a look that could only be described by the devastation it signaled. Then a flash, and now it's smiling, now they're lying and laughing together on that morning by the lakeside, and the sun is shining so brightly and beautifully… The contrast is jarring. It drains the moment of pleasantry, and it only makes that haunting face all the more horrifying when it, inevitably, comes back to her.
Occasionally, one of them will come around with an empty offering of food and a gentle prod of, "are you okay?" But okay is an island far, far over the horizon, and she is just drowning in the middle of it all, limbs flailing, mouth gasping for the air to scream.
What a horrible way to die this is.
Through it all, she wonders - what is the lesson here? Just what the hell am I supposed to learn from all of this?
Not to love? No… too cynical.
Not to love her?
…
Maybe sometimes things happen and you don't learn anything from them at all. Things just are, recklessly, without reason.
Am I like that?
What will she learn from me…?
Not to love? I wouldn't put it past her.
Not to love me? … well. What's the love of one mare in the world, in the grander scheme, really?
But that's empty rhetoric and she knows it. Her love is anything, any sign of life in this awful endless ocean, a splintered wooden plank or a bloated corpse to reach out for and grab hold of and hold on to so tightly.
That face appears again before her clenched eyes.
One day, not too many days from now, someone's going to think it's safe enough to ask the question on all their minds... what went wrong? Oh, they didn't mean anything by it!, they'll assure her when she bursts into tears - she knows she will, because she's crying now just thinking about it, and ponies don't ever change all that much. That was the answer, too, she supposed: neither of them ever changed. They stayed true to themselves to the bitter end, each unable to fit the other wholly into their life, trying to cut out some geometric portion of their lover to fit as neatly as possible into the vacant spaces of their heart, and tearing each other apart in the process.
She lies in tiny scraps on the floor, discarded, and tries to glue herself back together.