//------------------------------//
// XVIII. Aftermath 
// Story: Memoirs of a Magic Earth Pony 
// by The Lunar Samurai 
//------------------------------//

	I drew in a sharp breath as I surveyed the destruction I had wrought. It was horrifying to see the chaos that I had caused by my own hooves. Everything sat in disarray, nothing was in its place. There was a powerful hatred that had passed through this room that seemed so foreign to me now as my adrenaline subsided. I couldn’t tell you how long I had been so blindly guided by rage, but it felt as though everything had passed in an instant.
The room was a mess, and my mind began to think, once more, of the only grips I had on reality that were slipping away into the void. The world was quickly drifting into the hopelessness that I had fought so desperately to push out of my life. Just a few months ago, I had focused my attention on fixing my room, repairing it into something that I could be proud of, and in a blind moment of rage I had destroyed that very purpose.
Shame and guilt washed over my mind as I looked toward the desk that lay half broken in the corner. Just from shear rage I had thrown it clear across the room, targeting the already weakened wall. That desk… that was the first place I had considered that my life may have a future outside of the hell that was cereal production. I wanted to be something greater than just a farmer, more than just a caretaker of the land. I wanted to make an impact on society that would help generations of ponies for decades to come, but now all I could do was let myself drift into the darkness of my future. The desk was all but destroyed.
“Wait,” I muttered as I stepped toward the desk. Something inside of me sparked, tried to grasp onto that feeling of hope once more. It was my final stand to find that small bit of life that I so desperately craved. “Maybe I can fix this…”
I remember kneeling down next to the splintered pile of wood, picking up each piece in an attempt to recover the desk that had meant so much to me. I wanted to fix it, to bring back that life that I had almost had. I was willing to work to resolve the issues that the world had brought to me, to repair myself and to bring myself back to that hope that I so desperately needed to stay stable. I was grasping for anything, and the ruined desk caught my attention first.
I had never worked with wood before, but I had a general idea of how things could be mended. I figured that if I could just put the pieces of that splintered desk back together I could somehow make my own life better as well. I needed that hope, I needed that sense of assurance that everything was going to be okay.
I pulled the large flat wooden panel that had served as the desk’s surface from the pile. It was intact, mostly. There was a nasty crack that ran through its center, but other than that it was structurally sound. I gently placed it to the side and withdrew the legs from the pile and assessed their damage. To my surprise, the wood held up quite well compared to my fears. I placed them on the desk’s surface and turned my attention to the remains of the drawer. It was in the worst condition of the items, as it had come free of the table in the air and struck the wall alone. It’s four sides were separated from it’s base, and the wood that served as the bottom was split through its center.
“Alright,” I muttered as I withdrew the disassembled drawer from the pile and set it aside. “I can do this… I can fix this…”
I pushed aside the clutter that covered the floor and began to inspect the pieces of the table. The joints for the legs had cracked from their initial holding, but they could still support weight. It was a start, but I quickly realized that repairing the desk would be a monumental task.
Come on, Starswirl, Think! I tried to encourage myself, but the words did little to help me as I began to second guess the placement of the legs on the desk. It wasn’t a difficult task, mind you, but I wanted to put it back exactly the way it had been before my rampage. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but I was going to make sure it was good enough.
I needed something to stick it together, a glue or a fastener or something. It wasn’t a sudden realization, but one I had been avoiding for a very specific reason. I didn’t want to have to leave my room until I was finished resolving the problems that I had caused. I wanted to be focused, free of distraction, and retrieving anything outside of my room meant breaking my immediate attention from the project set before me. I was going to make things right, and that ultimatum came with a clause: I wasn’t going to leave my room until that task was completed.
I wish I had taken a moment to think about what had happened, to realize the truth of the situation. I was trying so hard to fit myself into a box that I couldn’t possibly live in. I wanted to break society’s rules, to tell them they were wrong, while remaining inside of that trap that society had established. In a way, I was trapped in that room the same way. I wouldn’t let myself leave, despite knowing it was an answer to my problems. I didn’t want to rely on anything but society, but I also wanted to break free of it. I was playing by the rules of a game that I was destined to loose.
Instead of acquiring wood glue, a proper toolset, or any assistance from the outside, I focused my attention on making everything myself. I found a small length of metal in that pile of wood as I tried to find something to resolve my problem. However, I was still refusing to accept the reality placed before me. I didn’t have the proper tools to reconstruct anything I had destroyed in that room. That realization, however, was completely lost on me as I tried, in vain, to procure nails from the surface of the table with that length of metal. I had no idea of the procedure to fix the desk, but I knew I could try something.
As you can imagine, my efforts to remove the nails resulted in several gouges in the wood. I tried my best to keep the destruction of the desk to a minimum, but my attempts were only met with more damage than had already been made.
I spent hours on the nails alone, eventually prying each one free of its wooden grip and bending several beyond their function. It was a nightmare, I couldn’t help but destroy the one thing I was trying to fix because I couldn’t bring myself to leave that room. Now, there was no guarantee that I would have been able to fix the desk with the proper tools, but that is only because I never went out and sought help. I thought I could do it on my own, that I could repair the desk to its original function, but as I worked into the evening it became blatantly obvious that I could not.
I assembled the desk back together after several hours of work, however the damage I had put it through to restore it was much worse than the damage it had taken when striking the wall. I had worked hard, diligently hammering at the nails to secure the legs once more, but I wasn’t able to bring them perfectly flush to the surface as they had once been. Many still stuck from the top as though a child had tried to restore it, but I was blindly satisfied with its reconstruction. I placed the desk back in its original location and turned my attention to the shelf.
It had fared a bit better than the desk itself, but there was still quite a few hours ahead to restore it. My makeshift hammer was twisting under its lengthy misuse but that did not stop me from continuing on with my quest. The shelf was a bit more straightforward than the desk as it had been assembled primarily with gravity for anything but the frame, but I was ready to start work once again.
I removed the nails, carefully avoiding the same level of damage that I had given to the desk during the same process. It took a bit longer, but I was able to keep the surface free of unsightly gouges this time. That put my mind at ease as I placed the panels of wood atop one another and began driving the nails through the holes once more. Securing the wood was slightly therapeutic to me. Repairing the damage as best I could was something that made me feel a bit less terrible about the actions that had unfolded in those moments of rage.
I worked late into the night, trying my best to restore everything I could using the rudimentary methods that I had developed. I figured that any work was good work, and it kept my mind repeating a similar theme throughout. I kept telling myself that everything would be okay, that maybe the council would change their mind, that there was a chance for me to change my life once more. I wanted that hope to return, so I drove a hole through reality to let the light in. I was grasping for something that simply could not exist.
“Maybe I can go back to them again…” I muttered to myself as I hammered a particularly straight nail into the shelf. “Maybe that was a test to see how I would react to their rejection. All I have to do is go back to them and prove to myself that they’re going to want me in their program. Maybe all of this is just a dream.”
The hole in my reality grew wider and wider, I was grasping at a light that simply wasn’t there, but at least it made my room look nice again. I was fixing my room and simultaneously trying to piece my life back together in order to keep my own security. I wanted to change, I wanted to be somepony different, I still had the thought that maybe, just maybe, I could truly pursue my dreams.
As I placed the final book onto the shelf that now resided against the wall, I took a deep breath and turned to the room. The damage in the wall was still present, the marks on the desk were still just as obtrusive, but the room itself was finally reassembled. The trash from the floor had been removed, the pages of each book that had come loose had been placed back in their respective location, and the pencils that had been snapped in two had been sharpened and placed on the desk once more. It wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was back together.
I sat down in the chair before my desk and withdrew a book from the small bookshelf at my side. I didn’t intentionally select An Introduction to Magic but as I realized what I had withdrawn, my heart immediately sank. The book was severely damaged. The hardback covers had been cracked and many pages were folded and torn.
I started to flip through the book, but that action brought my mind back to the night where I began to consider my change in destiny. It was devastating seeing the book that I didn’t own in complete disrepair. I had torn through it, trying to absorb what I could from i’s pages, but it was too far above my understanding for me to parse anything from its pages. I had been so eager, so ready to pursue magic in my own mind that I had simply cast it aside when I couldn’t understand what was on its pages.
Tonight, however, I looked through the text once more. Through the dim light of the candle my mind began to pull in bits and pieces of the information. I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to learn everything I could about the world of magic. It was a time when I truly felt like I was pursuing the life that I was destined to have. However, despite my hours of pouring my attention into that book, I began to realize the futility of my situation. I wasn’t able to justify my desires that I had pushed into my reality. I wasn’t able to grasp the hope that I so desperately needed.