April 12
Since I didn't have my flight clothes, after sex and snuggles I had to trot for my morning exercise. That was okay; it's good to exercise everything. But I've decided I don't like the sidewalks so much; it feels like my hooves are wearing down too much. The cement that makes up the sidewalks is very rough which is probably good for human traction but not as good for hooves.
I waved to a blue-haired woman who was getting her newspaper, and she waved back at me. I hadn't seen her ever before, but she obviously had lived there for a while. As I continued past, I thought about how strange it is when you really think about meeting people or ponies in passing. Like my classmates, they had lives of their own before they’d met me, but now I was a part of their lives and they were a part of mine.
The blue-haired woman has probably heard me clopping by her house before, and maybe even seen me out her windows, and until just today I had no idea that she even existed. And there could be some day in the future when I'm back in Equestria that she misses the sound of my hooves trotting by her house.
That was kind of a strange thought to have in the morning, but sometimes when I was out trotting my mind went off odd places.
After my shower and breakfast, I sat down at my desk and stared at my paper again. There was a poem that wanted to be let out, but it was stuck in my head. There were a whole bunch of ideas that had half-occurred to me while I was trotting down Academy Street or rinsing the soap out of my wings, but they'd all gone and hid.
Clicking on my pen with my tongue didn't make them come back, and neither did going from the desk to the bed, so after too long spent in frustration, I finally gave up. The words would come when they wanted to, but I couldn't force them.
I set my paper back down and looked out the window for a little while. There were skeleton-trees outside, and when they decided that it was spring they'd get leafy, but they were waiting for the right time, and maybe I was, too. Maybe this was my mind's way of telling me I wasn't ready yet.
Once when I was a filly I was looking over the edge of a cloud (I wasn't ready to fly yet) and down below I saw a ship that was making circles outside the harbor, and I didn't know why they wouldn't just go in. Only later did my Mom tell me that they had to wait for the tide to be right because otherwise they'd scrape open the bottom of their ship and it would sink. How must those sailors have felt to be so close to their port and yet they couldn't go there?
I looked out at the tree again. It was waiting. The ship had been waiting. I was waiting.
Sometimes that was all you could do.
I ate lunch with Cedric and Leon and Trevor. I was a bit hesitant 'cause of how the last time had gone, and I might not have if Leon hadn't come up next to me in the line and asked if he could carry my tray.
I couldn't say no, so I let him and then followed him over to his table. He set it down and made a big show of making sure that it would stay on the table and my ears drooped and I said that I was really sorry for overreacting. He said that we were cool, but when I went around to nuzzle him he held his hand out and pushed me back a little and said that we weren't that cool. Then he saw the look on my face and kind of glanced around the room to make sure nobody was looking and ran his hand through my mane and told me that by the end of the semester he'd be the laughingstock of the football team.
Just then Cedric set down his tray and told him that he was already the laughingstock of the football team. He said that the only reason anybody watched the games at all was to see his sack.
I said that I'd like to see it, too, and both of them looked at each other and just started laughing. I knew that I'd missed something, but that happened a lot when the two of them were together. They both had a strange sort of relationship, and I couldn't quite figure it out, no matter how hard I tried.
When Trevor sat down, they calmed down a little bit, but both of them were still snickering a little.
Conrad surprised us by not being in class when we started. There was an empty glass vase on his desk, and a small folded card leaned up against it that just said 'in memory.'
We kind of looked around at each other trying to figure out what the reason was, and finally five minutes after class had started a girl named Erica went up to the desk and opened the card and started to read.
It was a poem inside, about how the flowers the poet had described a hundred years ago were dead and gone but there were new flowers now. After she read the poem she untied the card from the vase and passed it around and pretty soon we were talking about the poem and what it meant.
We almost didn't notice when he came into class, because everyone was focused on the poem. But he spoke, reciting another poem:
I asked of Destiny, “Tell me who with relentless hand pushes me on?”
Destiny told me to look behind.
I turned and saw my own self behind pushing forward the self in front.
He told us that the man who had written those poems was called Rabindranath Tagore and he had been a poet from India. He told us about his travels and how he also had been awarded a Nobel Prize.
He said that we could have a whole class on just Rabindranath Tagore and that we could have a whole second class comparing Tagore to Kipling, but that life was too short and then he read us another poem from The Gardener, which was the 38th.
Then class was over, and I went right to the library before anybody else thought of it and asked one of the librarians to help me find that book. I was sure that they would have it; the library has three floors which must mean that they have a copy of nearly every book that there is.
He showed me how to use the computer that knew where the books were, and then gave me directions to find it.
It was on a top shelf, so I had to fly up to get it. The library had little stepstools on wheels, but it wasn't tall enough for me to reach the book. I felt a little bit guilty when I got it because a lot of places it isn't polite to fly inside without having permission first, but nobody yelled at me.
The same card that lets me into the dining hall and the dorms lets me borrow library books, but instead of swiping it through a reader, there is a wand that reads the stripes on the book and the stripes on my card, and then the computer that knows where all the books are knows that Silver Glow has The Gardener.
Before dinner, I got done with my homework for tomorrow’s classes even though I wanted to read the poetry book right away, and then it was time for dinner.
When I got back to my dorm room, I sat right down on my bed and read through the whole thing. The book was very interesting; it had English on one side and on the other it had the original language which looked very beautiful, even though I couldn't read it at all.
And I really liked the poems, too. I hoped that I hadn't spoiled class for myself on Thursday by reading these. It felt a little bit like I was cheating by reading ahead, which was funny because I didn't feel that way in any of my other classes. But then I just pictured myself confessing and Conrad would just smile and ask me which was my favorite poem and why.