When things whizz past me, they leave trails. It's only when I have a steady beat playing that I can control those streams. I speak of moments such as right now, sitting in this train car, staring out the window as the world blows by, with the latest track by Chemical Colts blasting into my ears. I have to turn the volume all the way up, so that way even the back of my teeth feel it.
The trails blend into gently undulating bands, and I can tell the chromatic keys apart from one another when I squint. I'm sitting with my back facing the front of the train, which is perfect. Everything is like a rainbow music sheet, and the countrysides and fencelines and villages of Equestria morph into separate notes, pulsating with each delicious beat that these wonderful, wonderful artists were endowed with enough wizardry to conjure.
The life of a DJ is truly a fantastic one. It gives me the ability to worship as well as to create. Each session is a delicious dip into the fabric of Equestrian soundspace, where I exalt the masterpieces that others have made and blend them with my own humble offerings. In the end, ponies love me for both, or perhaps they—like me—simply love the moment. A moment much like the one that I am having right now, but very late tonight—in a closed off sanctuary of sonic proportions—I will likewise be sharing with them, through bright lights and bass salvos and every pulsing, booming thing that houses the nerve to jump, jump, jump.
I only wish that I could get Tavi to understand. But, then again, she belongs to a different world, a very soft, velvety world of such fastidious qualities that I feel strangely blessed to be an audience to it.
And yet here, staring out into a morphing kaleidoscope of carefully controlled madness, I breathe in between the beats, hoping, yearning, that some day I could share this world with her as well.
When the clerk's hoof waves in front of my shades, it disrupts the trails, churning the prismatic lightshow into a jigsaw assortment of madness. I become aware of just how insanely loud I've turned up my headphones. I turn towards him in a daze, noticing the mixture of alarm and stern reproach across his wrinkled muzzle. So I switch the music off, wincing, for I'd just have sooner slammed the brakes of this very train. My world is jostled no less, the colors all colliding with one another until bleeding into a crimson crucible in the shape of his muzzle.
"—ickets please?" he chirps, a little too snappish for his own good, or mine. "I do need to see your ticket, madame."
I nod, shuddering slightly. My heart is racing, but not in the good way. The world is suddenly a gray malaise with no soothing hint of violet... her violet. I hate it when I feel naked like this, a nudity that used to plague me all the time. Only these last few years have I been able to dress it all away with melody and noise. I couldn't have accomplished it alone.
My mind is so confuzzled that I don't realize how long I've taken to rummage through my backpack. I rattle my turntable case a little too many times for my own good, and it makes my teeth chatter harder, a nervous foalish sound accompanied by scurrying red doves pouring out the sides of my muzzle.
And then, like an idiot, I wake up. Using telekinesis, I reach through the panic and pull the desired slip of paper out from my saddlebag situated in the chair beside me. I hold up it up to him with an embarrassed smile.
He gazes past it with utter ambivalence, which is somehow worse than I expected. I'm always worried by ponies I meet who are as gray on the inside as they are in appearance.
"Much thanks, Madame," he drones, the deadest noise ever, and he clamps a hole-punch through the thing, assaulting my earbones with crimson scimitars. Needling trails of blood lick at his bony haunches as he saunters off down the crowded cars. "Tickets? Tickets, please!" Ponies aquiesce his request, thier thin golden voices merging to form a thinner golden haze, and I become aware of the train's own beat over the tracks, a very meager thing that thrumps half-heartedly through the tailbones of everyone pretending to not be bored with this cross-country lurch.
I attempt repeating the Chemical Colts track, but it's jarring now. Besides, as I look out the window, I see nothing but open pasture with no structural blemishes to excite my imagination, or my restless imagination-within-an-imagination. My eyes are starved for something, and my ears want to rip through my head and eat them. I can't remember a time when I felt this antsy. Things have felt very different, I suppose.
Very different since the wedding.
I need to calm down. I have a show to host tonight. Ponies from all trots of the Northeast Underground will be there to dance and buck and froth the midnight hour away to the beats that I have to deliver. I can't let them down. I can't forsake this moment, this moment that deserves to be shared, an unending pulse that leads me forward, twitching, onto the soundstage.
I consider doing something I'm not used to. After all, I'm not adverse to a little adventure. I do come from Ponyville, after all.
I close my eyes. This is harder to accomplish than one can imagine. One would think that such a place would be a sanctuary to me. But here, the colors have no anchor. When the music plays in utter darkness, I descend into a spiral, and I don't always like where it takes me.
But lately, especially these last few weeks, it hasn't felt quite so perilous. The fall is still there, yes. In a way, it feels like plummeting towards the center of the earth. But instead of shattering into bits, there's something gentle that catches me, a fabric, a hammock, a safety net that keeps me from falling too deep to a place where I might never return.
And the strings are colored with royal purple velvet.
I don't know if this smile means I'm thankful or if I'm delirious. Either way, I allow the hammock to carry me somewhere distant, somewhere safe, a place that smells like the past.
Yesterday has a fancy habit of getting me quicker to tomorrow.