Sky Blue and I grew up together, inseparable best friends since we were fillies. We were always there for each other, through thick and thin, good times and bad. We got in and out of more jams than I can count, and we always did it together.
The day she coughed up little droplets of blood was no different. I was there with her waiting in the doctor’s office, holding her hoof while she was shaking like a leaf.
She started crying, so I rubbed her back and told her it would be okay. I had no idea if that was true, and she knew it, but it was enough.
It was enough because just being there was what mattered.
She trusted me to be there because she knew what I didn’t have to say.
☙ ⛅ ❧
It was right around the Running of the Leaves that she started to really get sick.
The changes she began going through were so much like the season; the way the foliage falls away, revealing what’s under it.
When some trees lose their leaves, their branches are all thorns and sharp twigs, tangled inward, waiting to stab and tear at anypony who gets too close. Not her, though. She was never like that. What showed in her was like one of those trees that reaches up, grasping for the sky with inviting, wide-open arms.
Even when her mane had fallen out and her feathers were molting in clumps, she was beautiful. She never grew thorns. She never lashed out and pushed me away to protect herself, afraid to be seen like that.
She wasn’t afraid because she knew what I didn’t have to say.
☙ ⛅ ❧
I entered the Running of the Leaves that year. She couldn’t. She didn’t have the breath for it by then.
She could only watch. Right before the race started, she walked up to me on the track, took the handkerchief off her bald head, and tied it around my front leg. It was the way a noble lady used to tie a scarf around the leg of a knight she favored in a tournament.
I heard her speak, just two words, soft as a gentle breeze:
“Good luck.”
But at that moment, I didn’t feel like I needed luck.
The race started, and I ran, hard and fast. I pushed myself until I was exhausted, then I found something I never knew I had and I pushed even harder. Her whispering voice rang in my ears every step of the way.
I won.
It’s the only year I ever have.
All the rest of that autumn, when we went out walking together through the fallen leaves, we’d look at each other and smile, because we both knew what they meant.
They meant what she knew I didn’t have to say.
☙ ⛅ ❧
Toward the end, when she was spending most of each day on strong painkillers, there were times I would come to visit and find her lying in bed, just staring out the window with an empty, listless gaze. When I saw her that way, I knew what the worst part of this was for her: not being able to fly, to soar free in the clouds where a pegasus belongs. As an earth pony who likes keeping her hooves firmly on the ground, I don’t know what flying is like, but I could feel how terribly she missed it. It hurt me to see how that loss just crushed the hope out of her. It hurt so badly that sometimes I cried. I’d have given anything to give her just one more day, just another hour, in the sky.
But when I came in, she’d turn away from the window. She would look at me and smile, even as tired as she was, and her face would light up like the sun and melt away that pain.
She smiled because she knew what I didn’t have to say.
☙ ⛅ ❧
When Sky Blue died, she was cremated, and I spread her ashes up here on this hill, overlooking the town, the fields, and the forests. I come here sometimes, and I think of her.
Sometimes I think about what I didn’t tell her.
It was just three little words, and I never said them. Maybe I should have. Maybe we should all say them more often. But truthfully? I don’t feel bad about it, because she always knew.
How could she not?
It was in the leaves.
She knew what I didn’t have to say.