Remember When

by Ice Star

Stellaura, In Pieces

You have seen me almost every night when you are not dreaming of the mundane. In libraries that you smile throughout as you walk cheerfully among the shelves, or mundane recollections, and nights with no dreams. In them, I am not yet to be, waiting for the ordinary cover of your first dreams to fall way. Sometimes, I am your first and only dream of the night.

Some nights, you wake up with a tightness in your throat, as though you had been crying.

That is how everything ended. Every night ends like this. That is the only end that I have to give, the only one imprinted on my light. Tears, tightness, and the closest stab of hurt that shocks the world from you.

You were crying. You never believed me. You never remembered. You would run, or you would fly off, and every time you would never believe me.

I do not remember my brother or my name. I do not remember what I should of my city, but for over one thousand years — for your entire life, I have been here trying to make you understand something that you and I must absolutely know in full. From the time you were a toddler, I was here pleading with at every moment I could between those fitful naps of yours. I have stood over a filly who was unable to talk to anypony outside of her family and foalsitter and pleaded for her to understand something my tongue has gotten twisted. I did so until tears ran down your cheeks and my non-existent heart ached as though I could still cry. It was all because I needed you to remember something, and your foalishness only tore you from me more than waking up ever could.

I cut against your teenage pseudo-skeptic phases with all I had to offer. I presented myself wearily to a married mare who was convinced I was little more than a figment of foal-related stress. When you were a widower, I tried to relate your loss to the loss that I am absolutely defined by, for every night I am sundered and unsundered at once with my existence. I am all the fragments of a fallen star within you. I am the dreams that made your heart heavy with a fuzz that vanished once you saw every new dawn.

You have seen me every night and never stopped looking at me like I was a stranger. Every night, I have to beg you again, and attempt to bring you back. Over and over, I try to tell you a name I do not remember, and every night is more difficult than the last. This is endless, and I have known this weariness as much as I know anything. I am stuck here, rooted in you as part of you. I have always been so, and yet I feel I have been rotting since forever and Marecca ended.

This never ends, seeing you so distraught and angry, your whole world shattering anew each and every night. Only, you get to wake up well and look toward the sun and its golden, blinding light. Meanwhile, I appear each night, wishing each failure to be less brutal than the last. I only stopped drifting when you were known, but the anchor that you are may be worse than always running from unknown ghosts. I can speak again, but it is all vanity. I can only tell you that you have the most brilliant ignorance, Twilight Sparkle, and it is not even your own fault.

I sound like a filly. I feel like a filly. I remember being a filly. I remember the desert sands, a pale-coated older brother, and how he would be there when I chased the butterflies around the gardens. But I do not remember what kind of flowers grew there, only that they were in Marecca, my city. I do not know anything else about my brother. I do not know his name, or what color his mane was. Even an outline is grander than what I have left. Most troubling of all, I do not remember myself. I do not know what the world felt like under my hooves, and I am no longer certain if I even had them anymore. I do not exist because I do not have a name, face, or magic. Without magic, there is nothing. Even my soul feels cleaved.

I remember being a child, a filly. But there is little else, if there ever was.

How can I be anything but a dream if this is all I am doomed to?

I really am doomed. I watch you every night, as you look upon me with horror, and reject my every word. For centuries, I have told you everything I could, pleading time and time again, and describing this empty feeling to you... only to watch your reactions of dismay and how you have crumbled.

And then everything begins again.

Nothing continues.

Nothing ends.

You never remember.

You can never look at me as anything but...

You are never going to realize it, are you? Though I may be robbed of all individuality, I have spent a thousand years watching you grow further from my every last attempt to stir any recollection. I know little. I am for little, and for this, I might as well not exist at all. Without the individuality memory would lend me and this agonizing endless beginning, I really am nearing nothing. If I am not able to have the self to define myself, I do not exist. Yet, I am still here.

But I know this. Please listen, if only once.

I know I am twined with you and you are as you are because of me. There was a time before you, and it was during the time after Marecca too. This was a time of huddling in a world that was pulled this way and that, as it quivered under layers of ashes, and I felt something when I was nothing. I ran, unremembering, for what might have been forever. Until, one moment, there was enough of a time that my almost-forever stopped. I felt a mother and a father, and in the womb of the former, mortal life not yet grown and realized. I felt an older brother, and thought that something I had buried in my frenzy of running was more familiar than it had ever been in this set of mortals. I felt that there was a home. Somehow, I was drawn to this combination of things for every reason I could never know... and then... I... well, it is hard to remember. I sank all that I was into the two components that were to be you, until I was the third fragment of what you would be.

Then you were born; this cycle began from your very first night. Nothing sunk in faster than the sheer vanity that things would be, from that night and all nights after.

I was always a butterfly. Fragile. Weary. Delicate. Renewed. Drifting.

Each time I fail, I think I forget a little more too. I certainly have had less to say since that very first night. To call myself anything, or make any attempt to acknowledge all this as whole — I, me, mine — feels disgusting and wrong. Even after all this time, I know not how else to convey what is left. Despite this... circumstance, and the brutal hold over what it has over all that is left of m-me, I shall do this again. I am not me, and thus, I am without choice more than I have ever been. I am begging you as I always have, do not think my woe will drag me through this again. I wish to slip away, I have pleaded silently for the mercy of apathy to something that I cannot resist the compulsion for, and it does not come. Our meetings — if I were to give them such a casual term for such desperate interactions — have been nothing short of me pleading through this unshakable heart-crushing fatigue, century after century because...

Well, I cannot tell you how many times I have called 'Remember when...' only to have next to nothing for you to remember, going so far as to scream my plea at you in this loop until my voice is hoarse.

You and I are not different. Whatever happened after that bonding has woven us together, as accidentally intended. You and I are the same. I am Twilight Sparkle as much as you are, and you are me as much as I am you... and yet, we are always incomplete. So many times have ended with you calling out that this is a dream and screaming the name of a mare you loved once — a mare you believed could help you? And yet, she did not come. This is a dream, and yet something much more personal, even if I lack identity.

I have forgotten, and you never knew.

But... I have wormed what little there is of myself within you and known you — for you and I are only so different. Maybe — I can pull a slim part of me — a phantom of myself free from you... though it will pull me apart again. With the greater piece of me, I might be able to find one who can remember when—

Author's Note:

[Revised for print on 11/30/2020]