The Waters of March

by Bandy

Saturday Evening

Sometimes, you don’t know where you’re going until you’re halfway there. Tonight was not one of those nights. Dash left the cabin with a purpose. She had to fly.

There was so much discontent in her life. This vacation was stressing her out, and the distance between her and Ponyville and the weather team that needed her was stressing her out, and the lack of distance between her and Ponyville and the weather team that needed her was stressing her out, and it all came together in a great wave that crashed over her whenever she took her mind off the immediate necessities of surviving flight. Flap your wings. Don’t tip over. Keep your head up. Don’t cramp. Don’t lock up. Don’t think too hard. Just don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

The low clouds from yesterday evening had been cleared out. Only the higher ones remained. Dash made it her goal to reach them by the end of the night. It helped to have goals.

What were her goals? Why was she here? To relax? She could relax in Ponyville on any cloud she could find. She could find a tree in Sweet Apple Acres and nap for hours uninterrupted.

Was it to get away? That notion seemed familiar, but it was equally easy to dismiss. There was always some more distant shore whose sand was slightly whiter, whose nights were slightly darker, whose clientele was slightly more interesting.

If she could just make it up to the jetstream--

But this arm of the jetstream didn’t end over tropical islands full of whiter sand and darker nights. This arm of the jetstream ended when it melded with another air current to form the Great Zebrican Front, ten thousand miles away. Miles and miles of ocean. There would be no way to stay airborne that long, not in the jetstream. It would fold her eventually, crumple her up and cast her into the ocean, and then finally she would be as far away from anything as she could possibly be, down at the bottom of everything, alone with herself forever--

But then, there was still the issue of Rarity.

a hope, a gasp, it’s a slip of the tongue, it’s a feeling of life, it’s the air in your lungs, a trip, a fall, a journey for two, get there and then go away, stay or just pass on through, she’s a truckload of bricks in the soft morning light, the sound of a shot in the dead of the night, a knife in a cake, or smoke in a hearth, the fear in the friend, the danger of art, she will take you alive just to chew you apart, not that you really cared, you might just feel it’s luck, in the dark, in the wet, you came up to breathe, and she pushed you back down to the crash of the sea, it's the fear that you feel when your lungs beg for air, you're so far from the sky, there's no time to get there, and the line holding back the sea from the sky, it is falling away and you don’t know why, but it’s all you can do to keep your mouth shut so you don’t taste the tears, so you don’t eat a bug

Rainbow Dash coughed and twisted in midair. When she stabilized, she finally realized just how high she had flown without realizing it. The jetstream roared above her, no more than a few hundred yards away. Lights from the island twinkled below her--no further away, it seemed, than they were last night.

This indecision was eating her. Dash was a pony of action. Many years of living had taught her that you never know which way is the right way until you’ve already arrived. It’s never good enough to speculate. All you can do is decide.

So she decided. It would happen tomorrow.