Ledger…
No, John.
John’s the main character.
Inventor sighed.
No wait, let me try again.
John. John sighed.
Sometimes, he felt out of place. Not in a ‘don’t belong here’ kind of way. Just, like, when you try and force a puzzle piece into a slot it’s not meant to be. It can be the right shape, close to the right size. It can even look like it goes there. But it always just seems… off. You have to force it, but you aren’t sure if you want to, if in doing so you’ll ruin the puzzle as a whole. Not sure if you want to chance it. If you should even dare.
After all, other people will look at the puzzle most likely. Their experience might be reduced should the piece end up being incorrect. Do you really want to shoulder that responsibility when all’s said and done? Of course, you think it looks good there, it matches what you know of the puzzle. And, in the end, it’s your puzzle. Surely you have the right to do with it as you see fit, regardless of what the critics might say.
Similarly, it was hard to feel like a piece of Ponyville as a human. Of course, this didn’t really come up much, John certainly didn’t feel strongly enough to try and change race, he merely felt off kilter whenever he walked through town. And it seemed, on several occasions, like other people agreed with him. Like, sometimes, the universe felt the need to show him how badly misshapen a piece he was.
He supposed, in the long run, being a pony wouldn’t change much. It wasn’t integral to his role in the world that he be human after all. But, he also supposed, ponies weren’t that way either really. Aside from the fur and sort of… cuteness that was inherent to ponies it really wouldn’t be any different if everyone in Equestria were human.
But, of course, not everyone saw it that way. They didn’t think about the existentiall scenarios of ponies. Rather they focused on the one thing that seemed misplaced and complained about it, about how a human was unnecessary, occasionally telling Berry Punch that a pony would be better suited to the job as her assistant than a human would be, that she should feel bad for giving a job to such a strange creature.
Berry would do her best to ignore these ponies, and John was rather happy to see it. But he knew she thought about it in the calmness when there weren’t orders to fill. When she was alone with her thoughts.
Not that John could blame her for that, especially since he felt the same way. It wasn’t that no one gave him support of course, several ponies did that. But in the end, the compliments weren’t what stuck with him. It was always the handful of words that had filtered into his head over the day that made him feel like crap, no matter how insignificant they were among the others.
This was the biggest thing that kept John up at night. About how maybe he should just… fade away.
But that wasn’t an option. He needed an income. He had to slog through day after day under the light words of those against his position, pretending they didn’t matter as he smiled and handed out smoothies to the regular customers. Hiding behind a fake smile and a smoothie maker, laughing with the jokes and smiling at the stories, but never fully enraptured in any of them, never fully escaping the negative pool of insults that only seemed to build and build with each passing day.
In the end it was what he had to do. And there would never be a happy ending to that problem. It would always linger on his heart. But he had to push through it. Because he had promises to keep. Friends to talk to. Even when everyone said he’d been shoehorned into their little burb he promised himself he wouldn’t leave. Not as long as there was one pony who wanted him there. And he hoped he’d have the strength to keep that promise to himself if the time ever came. No matter how far off it seemed.
“I’m not human for the sake of being human.” He said to himself. “I’m human because that’s who I am. Because it’s part of me. Even if a pony would be no different I am human because that’s who I am.”
And, eventually, it would be these words that guided him to sleep at night, settle his roiling stomach, calm his roaring mind. It would be there again, in the morning. That feeling of piercing unease.
But for right now, while he slept. He didn’t care.