Lily's Letter

by Miller Minus

I - Her Letter

I never paid enough attention to the things I did or what they said about me. Like how little I hung out with my friends. Like how easy it was for me to dodge a get-together without presenting any excuses. Like how little I spoke when I was with them, regardless of how much alcohol they bought me.

Like how I brought her stupid letter to the bar in the first place. I had no reason to, but did I need one? I just wanted to show it off, I suppose. I even flattened it on the table and passed it around so that my friends could read it one at a time.

Hey, you!

It's been awhile, hasn't it? I was hoping to say hello this weekend. Meet me at 2 o'clock this Saturday evening at Canterlot Castle if you're up for it. Dress warmly, come alone, and bring stories!

—Lily

As my friends slid the letter around the table they each frowned at it in hollow acknowledgement. She must have had somepony else write it for her, I told them. No way could she hold a quill that well, even with magic. One of my friends—can't remember which—joked that she sounded like an old flame of mine. I told them she was more like the garbage can underneath it. That got a few laughs around the table, just in time for the conversation to change to something else. Something about a wedding.

That was typical. They were at that age where they only talked about alcohol, weddings, kids, and nothing else. Or maybe it wasn't an age that they'd hit, but a stage in their lives. They were all married themselves—some of them to each other. I don't know what was more painful, the mundane talking beats they hit every single day, or seeing the friends I'd known since magic school joining in, as if their mouths had been factories of vapidity their entire lives. I didn't contribute; I just kept staring at the letter, reading it again and again until I could close my eyes and recite it word for word. And I only noticed that the thought of pretending I'd never received it had vanished when it was already gone.

Lily was a friend of mine from magic school—one of my best—whom I hadn't seen in seven years. And we had only drifted apart because...

...of a reason I could no longer recall. I think it may have just happened. She certainly wouldn't be the first.

My friends didn't care because they didn't know Lily, which was a blessing in disguise that only revealed itself the next morning. Saturday morning. The Saturday. The epiphany woke me up like a lightning strike between my ears, as if she had whispered the letter to me in a dream, over and over again until it finally struck me.

There was no 2 o'clock in the evening. Only in the morning. She wasn't inviting me on a guided tour of the castle. She was asking me to trespass.

I tore up my apartment for a way to write her back. The sun stung my eyes, as always finding the perfect angle through the boards over my windows. I found the back of an invitation for a party I never attended under a stack of old newspapers and a pencil worn down nearly to its eraser on the floor under my mattress. I scribbled out the invitation, flipped it over, wrote back to her and sent it on a rush.

Can we do Sunday instead? I need my beauty sleep.

The reply came that evening when I was eating dinner. It was in that same fancy writing again. It was sarcastic, honestly, coming from her.

Trust me, if you're going to Canterlot Castle, you have to go at night. Besides, I'm tied up on Sunday. I'll be there at 2. Join me or don't!

—Lily

P.S. Don't let the guards see you, eh?

And just like that I was going to commit a crime for the first time since magic school.

Comments

[Ice Star]

I don't know what was more painful, the mundane talking beats they hit every single day, or seeing the friends I'd known since magic school joining in, as if their mouths had been factories of vapidity their entire lives.

This is something I have to see every single day in so many people. It's starting to seem like an affliction that just grabs a lot of folks and never lets them go, shaping them into this horribly, painfully normal bunch of bleh that just... does exactly this. Normally, this is something I see idealized as 'contentment' and what someone might want to aspire for. It's a theme I'll see often in ponyfic too, and to stumble across one of those few stories that points this out is a wonderful surprise. I'm sure this will be a good one.