Ghost Lights

by Winston

Chapter 39

Ghost Lights

Chapter 39

---

When I arrived at my mother's home a couple days later at mid-afternoon, I found her where I expected to, sitting on the long wrap-around front porch that stretches across the front of the house and around one of its sides. Her tan colored coat and lilac mane were familiar as ever, always kept smooth and clean with a feminine grace that contrasted with her love and talent for gardening and working in the dirt of the earth. I still don't know how she does it.

I landed on the flagstone front walk and started following it up to the porch. She got up to greet me as I approached. There was excitement springing in her steps and shining in her eyes when she trotted over to meet me halfway. "Hello Sunburst!" She wrapped her forelegs around me in a hug and kissed me on the cheek. "I'm so glad you're here. It's good to see you again, finally."

I hugged her back. "It's good to see you again, too, mom."

We held on to each other for a little while. She was familiar, something I'd known all my life - the softness of her coat against mine, and the scent of earthiness mixed in a subtle way underneath a soft fragrance of flowers. I wondered briefly what I felt and smelled like to her. It's hard to know these things about yourself, I suppose. I did know one thing from the way she hugged me, though - that I was as familiar and comfortable to her as she was to me. That kind of welcome was a good thing to feel.

She broke away after a bit. "Let me look at you." She stepped back and looked me up and down briefly.

"I doubt I look much different than the last time I was here," I said.

"Nope, I think not." She nodded in a satisfied way. "Still my little filly."

"Little?" I smiled. "We're the same size. Have been since I was a teenager."

"Whatever. You could be as big as a Clydesdale and you'd still be my little girl," she replied and laughed.

"Not that anypony'd know it by looking at us," I said.

"Yeah, well, they know who your dad is, though," she said. "That's for sure."

"Not exactly many pegasi in this town." I nodded.

"Eh, it's been getting there." She shrugged. "We had another couple pegasus families move in lately. Weather managers, I think. Starting to get more unicorns, even, too. Seems like pretty soon this might not be just a little farming village anymore."

"That's the usual lifecycle of a settlement like this, I guess," I said. "Speaking of dad, have you heard from him lately?"

"Oh, of course," she said. "He still flies out from Cloudsdale and comes around to visit, like always."

"That's good."

She thought for a moment. "Actually, I saw him very recently, since you mention it. He slept over a couple nights ago."

That hit me with some surprise. It was strange enough to hear that it threw me for a little bit of a loop. "You mean, slept over, as in..."

"Well, yeah." Her voice sounded as if it was obvious. "What else would I mean?"

"Sorry." I shook my head and felt the heat of a slight blush coming on. "It's just weird to hear your parents talk about that... especially when they're divorced."

"Ehh." She shrugged slightly and waved a hoof in an unconcerned gesture. "I know it seems kinda funny, but... you know, we got divorced because we couldn't figure out how to be married and live together, not because we didn't love each other. Even after all these years we still do. Sometimes that's what ponies who love each other do together. It's no big secret or anything. You're a grown-up, you know how this works."

"You just got done saying I was your little filly," I noted.

"You can be two things." She smiled at me. "I realized a long time ago that I was going to have to accept it. I'd be a lousy parent if I didn't let my kid grow up. Remember that when your turn comes."

We stood there quietly together looking around at the yard for a few moments. I rather awkwardly didn't know what to say.

"Well, come on around back," my mother said after a minute. "I'll show you what I've got in the garden this year."

I followed her and we walked around the house through the side lawn to the back yard. As it usually was, the large sprawling garden was a mix of vegetables and flowers. I recognized most of it - cucumbers, tomato plants, peppers, various herbs like green onions and dill, carrots, and many others, all of it edged around the sides and back by rose hedges trained into thorny upright bushes. In a wide patch at the very front, tall thick green stems covered in a short fuzz rose vertically out of the ground and reached upwards for the sky. At the top of each one, tilted on a slight diagonal to face east, was a large bright yellow sunflower.

I walked up closer to them. The flowers were tall, nearly a foot over the top of my head, and I looked upwards at their undersides before I took off and hovered for a few flaps so I could see them from above. They looked like a field of cheerful yellow faces with black eyes in their centers enjoying a bath in the afternoon sun.

"They're looking good so far," my mother said. There was a pleased smile on her face as she regarded her brilliant yellow blooms.

I landed back on the ground. "They're pretty." I slowly ran my hoof up the stem of one of the flowers. I could feel the rough, fibrous texture of the covering of fine, stiff hairs that coated it. They were tall enough to cover me in a pleasant dappled shade, partly blocking the warm sun overhead while I stood in the patch.

"Yeah, they're beautiful flowers," my mother said. "That's why I wanted to name you after them. The first time I saw you after you were born, with that yellow coat, that's what I thought of and I knew Sunflower would a perfect name. I guess dad saw something else, though. He wanted to call you Fireburst after your aunt Spitfire."

"So you went half and half and I became Sunburst," I finished. "It's a good story. You've told it to me a bunch of times."

"I know." My mother smiled and nodded slightly. "One of the few things where your dad and I were able to compromise and meet halfway on something and both still be completely happy with how it turned out. Looking back at it, I'm actually pretty glad we did. Sunburst is a... more 'pegasus' kind of name. I guess that's a good thing, with you having wings and the way you really turned out to be more of your father's daughter. Would you have been mad at me if I'd given you an earth pony name like Sunflower?"

"No." I shook my head. "Well... maybe a little unhappy about it, when I was younger. But I would have gotten over it and it would be fine now. They're pretty. I can appreciate them."

"Also useful for their seeds, too," my mom continued. "It takes a little bit of good timing to get the most out of them, though. The trick is to let them stay on the stalk long enough for all the seeds to ripen, but you have to harvest before the birds start getting to them and eat 'em all."

I stood there and I could feel the dirt, soft and yielding and a little springy and airy but moist under my hooves. The bed the flowers grew from was carefully tilled and raked, weeded meticulously and watered and fed to be just perfect. The memory of all that I felt in my brief time as an earth pony at the ancient henge came to my mind.

I couldn't feel it directly at that moment, not without Azure to transform me again, but the memory was as clear as a cloudless sky and I could imagine it and hear its echo. My eyes closed and I let it flow through me. I could envision the life in the earth, raw vitality coursing up through the roots and into these plants. I could tell how carefully it was prepared, how earth pony magic was woven into the work, and the way that it was a labor of love - I could see and feel my mother's love, and how the depth of her capacity for it was on display here in a way that before now I'd never really been able to understand before.

At that moment, I suddenly knew her better than I ever had in all my life before then. I could see the way that this same love had always been infused into how she'd taken care of me in a way that had largely escaped me until then. Maybe for the first time, I really felt like her daughter.

Maybe now I could say certain things. I wanted to. I was aching and sore in my heart from how much I wanted to and had never been able, and it hurt in a subtle kind of way that I'd been trying to just ignore for such a long time that it was easy to forget it was there at all... but it was.

Now was the time.

"We've always had trouble with birds, haven't we?" I asked quietly.

"Sometimes I wish you were still around when they show up," My mother said. "You're always fast enough on your wings to be good at chasing them off. Much better than these legs of mine."

I stared up at the undersides of the sunflowers and their petals glowing bright yellow in back-lit sunlight. "Maybe too fast sometimes," I mumbled.

"Too fast?" my mom asked incredulously. "I thought there was no such thing for a pegasus. At least not for ones like you and your dad and your aunt."

"Do you remember the last summer that I lived here?" I asked.

"Right before your senior year of high school when you moved out to your dad's house in Cloudsdale?"

"Yeah, that one," I said. "There's... can we go sit down?" I looked over at the porch.

"Sure," my mom said. We walked over and sat down next to each other in the shade.

"There's things I should have told you but I never did," I said, once we were situated. "Do you remember that crow we had so much trouble with?"

"Vaguely," my mom said. "They're clever birds. There's been a few troublemakers."

"Well, that summer, that one was different," I said. "I felt like I chased her away a thousand times and nothing worked. Then one day she just... disappeared. Never came back."

"I remember it." She nodded.

"Alright, so... the truth is that she disappeared because I made her disappear," I said. "I caught her and I killed her. I flew her down and crushed her to death with my hooves. Then I buried her."

"What? Why didn't you ever say anything?" she asked, wide-eyed and surprised.

"I didn't know how," I said. "I wasn't ready for that. I thought I was, but I found out I wasn't. Not like that. Not the way... not the way I got her blood on me. Not the way I watched her break. I thought it was something I had to do but I also thought I couldn't talk about it because you'd just be mad at me and you'd never understand, because you're a... I mean, you're not a..."

"Because I'm not a pegasus," she said for me. "Well... you're right. I'm not. Can't blame you there."

"That's why I left," I said. "I felt... isolated. That's the only way to say it. Once that happened, it was like my eyes opened in a new way and I looked around and started to see the whole town differently. It was me, and earth ponies, and that's it. Nopony else was like me. It was so uncomfortable that there was nopony I could tell and nopony I could talk to. I didn't think any of them would understand how I felt. Keeping that inside made me stressed, and angry, and most of all, scared. I didn't know who I was anymore and what it meant that I could do something like that. I needed help figuring things out and there wasn't anypony around here to go to. It didn't make me very nice to be around, either."

My mother sat there quietly thinking for a long moment and finally nodded slowly. "I always kinda thought something must have happened that summer," she said. "You always mostly wanted to be alone but you never hid as much as you did then... and you started getting so temperamental and snippy at everything. I had no idea what was going on."

"I'm sorry about that," I said. "I didn't mean to, I just couldn't handle it. I needed dad's help. He's the one I told. He helped me get this figured out and not be so screwed up anymore."

"It's alright," she said. "I'm just glad I finally know why. That explains a lot. You were always your father's daughter. I missed you, but even back then I think I knew it was for the best that you finally went to live with him for a while. An earth pony trying to raise a pegasus only goes so far."

"I'm still sorry," I said.

"No, don't be." She wrapped her forelegs around my barrel from the side and hugged me.

"I'm sorry that I killed a helpless bird," I went on anyway. Now that it was started, there was a feeling of pressure inside creating an urgency to get this out. I carried it and carried it for so long and I just wanted to be rid of all of this. It gushed out and I couldn't stop it. "I'm sorry that she suffered and died because I was too angry to find any other way and I didn't understand all of what I was doing. I'm sorry that I couldn't handle it and I took it out on you. I'm sorry that I snapped at you and ignored you and lied about what was really happening. I'm sorry that I'm a coward and I ran away to the clouds and left you here alone for so long without even telling you why. I'm sorry I've always been so distant. I'm sorry I never really understood who you were before. I'm sorry I wasn't the daughter and the kind of family you deserved."

With each unspoken burden I gave a voice to at last, a feeling came over me of weight crumbling away and falling off. I felt light enough to float away, but I didn't want to drift off - right here with my mother was where I wanted to be. I leaned into her to hug her in my forelegs. My face was hot and my breathing was heavy. My eyes were streaming with tears as I rested my head against her neck and clung to her, sobbing.

She just held me for a while, rocking me slowly and slightly from side to side and kissed the top of my head in a gentle, mom kind of way.

"Everything's alright now," she whispered to me. "I love you, Sunflower. I always have and I always will. You know that."

"Yeah. I know." Even through my tears, it was one of the happiest moments of my life because of the sheer relief I felt. The rifts that had been between us were gone, washed away in the torrent of a breaking dam of words finally spoken. I had my mother back.

I sniffed and wiped some of my tears away. "I love you too," I said.

---

Soft sand underhoof and a cloudy sky overhead were my only companions as I walked along the beach and listened to the rhythmic surf of the ocean washing against the edge of the island I was exploring. This lonely western edge of the world was empty and vast, and all mine. The sound of the waves pulsed through me, the white noise of the crashing and receding bringing me incredible joy.

I took to the air and flew. From the air over this little island, I could see the beach of the mainland coast over to the east, separated by just a small strip of clear blue water. The Seawall was there, visible in the distance, flanked by the mountains it spans between. I knew that this wasn't strictly accurate, that this island shouldn't really be here so close to the mainland, but it in the moment it seemed right enough not to question. I was just glad to be here.

My heart was filled with a sense of being home. I knew I was where I belonged.

At the same time, there was a distant anxiousness. Some part of me knew that this wouldn't last. It never does. A few months at the most is all I could ever get at one time. Often it was much less even than that. This would be a short one, I could tell. Still, I didn't want that to bother me. As I told Azure, all that can ever really be done is to enjoy the sun while it shines.

I was looking for something, but I wasn't sure what. It was mysterious, a presence that I felt hiding somewhere in this wilderness. Whether it was a living thing or just an echo of something past, I couldn't tell. All I knew was that the challenge of seeking it out was something I was enjoying. I walked and flew over the rocks, sandbars, and pale white time-bleached driftwood while I searched and soaked in the surroundings.

I never wanted this to end.

I had no choice in the matter, unfortunately.

Everything became indistinct and my eyes were opening before I could help it. I was laying in the bed in my old room at my mother's house, I realized. Of course I was. I was staying with her for the first week of my leave period. It was time to be waking up, too, since morning sunlight was starting to stream in the window. I turned under the blanket and sighed. I remembered being a little filly and waking up in this same room, just like I was now, and looking around to see these same walls and the same ceiling. I never woke back then from dreams quite like this, though.

This one was real and intense. This one was a place that lived in my heart and always would, forever.

One of the risks a pony faces in finding something they love is that it will haunt them ever after with an unceasing longing for it.

I felt empty and cold inside now that it was gone. The waking world seemed colorless and lifeless, not worth the effort to crawl out from under the covers and face. I wished I could just fall back asleep and return from whence I just came, but I knew it doesn't work that way. It made me sad that there was no going back. All I could do was close my eyes and brace for the wave of depression that I could feel would probably grip the rest of my day. These happen frequently in the first weeks after I return from a deployment on the wall, fading away slowly as I think about it less and less. It was a price to pay, part of the readjustment process.

Maybe Rarity was right that it was better to have loved something and lost it than never to have loved at all, but that loss part can be one hell of a kick in the gut sometimes. I cringed and pulled a blanket further up over my head.

My dark mood was interrupted by the smell of cooking starting to waft up from the lower story of the house. It was good, vegetables and eggs being fried into omelets for breakfast.

I knew who was cooking them.

I thought about that. Maybe... maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

I found the strength, after a little while, to push away the covers and get up. I headed out of my room and down the flight of stairs from the second to the first floor, and made my way to the kitchen.

My mother looked up from her cooking. "Good morning," she greeted me. That voice sounded bright as the morning sun, the welcome as warm as a beam of its light.

I walked to her and rubbed my cheek against hers, returning the affection. "Yes. It is a good morning," I said.

By the time we were sitting down at the table with breakfast, the sting of my longing for the place in my dream was gone. The fondness for it remained, but the sense of loss over not being there disappeared. What I was really aching for, I realized, was a place I called home. Part of what defines where a pony feels at home is the presence of something they love, whether it's some aspect of the place itself, or somepony in that place. My mother and I had always been distant from each other, different kinds of ponies without commonality. No longer, though. Now that I had seen through her eyes, stood in her earth pony hooves, and just told her the truth, that distance was crossed, the barrier overcome. Now that I knew the extent of her love as it truly was, I knew that when I was with her in her home, it was a place I could feel that I belonged in every bit as much as I did in Cloudsdale with my father or out on the Seawall in the lonely wilderness.

In that moment I knew that I finally made it. After so many years, I was finally home.

Comments

[wolfstorm56]

Good on Sunburst, getting some closure with her mom. I really enjoyed this chapter, it had some lovely poignancy to it.

[SIGAWESOME]

As 6161029 mentioned, this chapter had some nice poignancy with Sunburst's closure with her mother (even if she, as an earth pony, did not fully realise the cultural/tribal implications of Sunburst's actions).

That last bit about returning home reminds me of a quote by George Moore:

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.