In an Ocean of Noise I First Heard Your Voice

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Mountains Beyond Mountains

One day, we will deserve to cry. To scream. To howl. But—for the moment—we're stuck wishing that were yesterday. Or at least, I am.

Right now, the silence pushes me away. Outward. Like blood from ice water. We both built the sepulcher behind me, paved it with our separate secrets, painted the walls with our surmounting disinterest. But somehow the cold restrain displaces me more.

Meanwhile, you're always staying in place—anchored to the eye of a frozen storm. Stuck downstairs in the living room, listening to that same old record. Again. And again. Who even composed it? Do you know her anymore?

I don't—or at least that's what I pretend. Just like I force myself to believe that this motion means something. This midnight patrol that takes me nowhere and everywhere on a tank full of sighs. When did Ponyville get so large and complex? There are more streets and corners than I recall, and every turn takes me down another shadowed vein of a scarcely familiar cancer. Did we even need so many buildings? And castles? This town was never built to change so drastically. One could say the same thing about ponies. Or—perhaps—us.

Sugarcube Corner. It's a vague splotch of coral beneath a charcoal cloud ceiling. It used to be the tallest building on the west end of downtown. Now, from a block away, I can't see its chimneys through the surrounding rooftops. Was there a time when I carried my head higher? So that it appeared to my eyes more easily? Or did all of yesteryear's sanctuaries shrink overnight? Just like our faiths.

I turn away. But it's too late. I'm ten years younger and I hear you for the first time. Your strings. Your cadence. Your harmony against the wayward cacophonous birthday celebration of some earth pony foal or another. Some pink fuzzball is shrieking and yodeling for local farm yokels and you're positioned dead center on the front stage with your cello and you're just struggling. Absolutely struggling to maintain order.

But that struggle is beautiful. I've tasted of the Trottingham music scene before, but not this close. This pristine. A symphonic genius wrapped snugly in burgundy and velvet. I've spent all my young adult life trying to be modern and edgy and new-age but just a single tickle from your bowstring makes me want to switch religions.

I remember hanging out an hour longer, an uninvited guest at some hole-in-the-earth bakery. I remember pretending to be there for the cupcakes. I remember having to dodge and evade all of the invasive questions of the bright fuchsia party host. Just so I could indulge in that beauty some more. And then...

You were gone. I wondered if I had just suffered a delusion. Suffered—because I swiftly realized I would have to live the rest of my life deprived of that exquisite instrumentation.

Until I wasn't. We met again. One year later in Canterlot. There was a royal wedding that required our separate talents. But we found ourselves too busy dealing with chaos and violence. We dove into an abandoned shop and hid under tumbled furniture while shape shifting bugs summoned the apocalypse right on top of us. We confessed our regrets and aspirations and fears and shame, surfing a tumultuous wave of hysteria. And by nightfall, we were alive and laughing. Not once did we scream.

I can see Canterlot now from here. No, not its shape. Not even the mountains through the midnight clouds. But there is a light—there are always lights—faint and flickering stars. Always receding. I contemplate hiking across Equestria, scaling those pale bluffs, and letting loose that goddessawful scream that eludes me. That eludes us.

It would never reach you. There are enough mountains between us at home. I feel them rising every day. A continental shift; a mild splash against the shore. It's all the same when I arrive in the kitchen each morning just to see you shuffling away. Returning to your record player.

You always play the same melody. It's the same instrumentation I first heard you perform in Sugarcube Corner. But I don't think you know that. Nor do I believe that you're aware of how venomous it is for me to hear you play it all the time. Something malicious—at least—would be substance. A poetic muse of gravity. Even a single grain of it would shatter those mountains. Would melt the glaciers that have formed in between. But that's far beyond you. Home is a place of comfort, after all.

That's what we found for each other: comfort. And the speed of its acquisition was scary. Or—at least—it should have scared me. Just how quick it was. How quick we were. Our smiles. Our ideas. Our melodies. They blended like colored sand across impossible distances. Ripples in an ocean. A sonic dance that formed a semblance of an orchestra. We had no name for it, and we had even less of an impetus to formulate such.

But we pursued it with vigor. So much vigor. Laughing. Galloping. Gliding our way into tomorrow. We moved into the neighborhood of where I first met you. You said that it felt an awful lot like Trottingham. I said it was nothing like Manehattan, but that was fine. It was more than enough of a sacrifice just to see you content.

I stop around the foundation of Ponyville Town Hall. I turn and look south. Cottages roll like bones beyond black bones against a necrotic horizon. You're lying somewhere in that obsidian forest, neither living nor dead, stuck between the spokes of revolving contentment.

I thought it was a sacrifice. You thought it was a sacrifice. But it was just an indulgence, a wave of the hoof that sent you spinning. Drowning down the throat of that frozen whirlpool.

And what makes those first few years of joy vanish like candle smoke is the knowledge that I indulged as much as you did. Perhaps more so. What worse evil is there than keeping somepony you care for happy so long as they remain that somepony and don't become anything greater?

I heard your song. I heard your talent. I heard your melody and your grace and your beauty. I fell in love with all the things you created—for me and for the world.

But did I ever hear your voice? And—if I did—did I ever once bother to cultivate it? Or help you do so? Even if it meant you doing so on your own?

Even now, I'm not really talking to you.

Who is this?

Who even is this? Nopony but the ghost of the mare I was once smitten with. Once—a goofy spark in a black ocean of noise—trying to be classy against a tidal wave of bedlam. So adorable and absurd. And I've clung to her for so long. I still do. Selfishly and cowardly. Afraid to scream us both awake, for fear that I would lose my grip of the joyful phantom I've tugged out of you, draining the soul that's stretched between.

It's no wonder you've surrendered to a shadow of your past self as well. It wasn't so bad at first. We were both happy to hover in orbit of the mania that first drew us together. But—looking back—even I have to admit that those first few years... months... weeks weren't quite as holy as I choose to remember them.

It was just a feeling. A joyous, ecstatic, wild feeling—that brought us together—nurtured under chaos and baptized with impulsiveness. And as the seasons drew on, and before the first inkling of a mountain rose from the bedrock, we suckled all we could of that sweet nectar, not daring to believe there were shorelines to discover apart from each other.

Such was the price—and continues to be—of measuring our worth by a singular moment. All the imperfections were there, screaming in our faces, but we refused to join the chorus. That's when the charade began, and its poison swelled in some directions more than others.

Myself—a bland remixxer born upon the plains of post-modern mediocrity—found the body and soul largely immune to the bitter spread. In the vestiges of my own self-deprecation, I simply assumed that your classier and more sophisticated essence would outfly the viper's kiss. But such wasn't the case. You plummeted. The finer the instrument, the heavier the plunge—I suppose—but even when I saw the first signs of your spiral, I tugged the knots harder. Tightening the noose.

The worst fate for a perfectionist is being paired up with a charlatan like me. Yes, it's easy to blame the victim. I've been doing that for years—sometimes even without knowing it. And you... so classy and sophisticated... all you could do was obsess over a single harmony against the noise. Just as I found you, and just as I kept you. All these years, like a treasure. A glass box where all the knives have turned inward. And by the time I saw the last hilt driven in, it was too late to break you free.

A curious death, hopelessness is. It's just life lived slower. We suckle on words like “depression” and “ennui,” hoping—dreaming—that compartmentalizing the red tide on paper will somehow make it just as easy to filter out of the sea that surrounds us, engulfs us, becomes us. On nights like these I wonder if you were truly just a masterpiece set apart, and not simply a lone note in the noise that I selfishly plucked loose that day—only to become a discordant jolt against the enormous nothing beyond. And now that you've tasted of that black echo, you cannot swim anywhere else—only filter yourself down that looping hole in the record, repeatedly, as the one way of escaping your captor. Just to be frozen in place.

And so I've come to wonder if this has become our natural state, an elliptical song without a bridge, with nothing to hold back the tide that now brings me back—trotting and shuffling under darkness—with the same oily press that initially pushed me out of the house to begin with. I see the lights on through the front window, dim and dull but not quite dying. Like Canterlot, waiting for a scream that will never come.

I shuffle in through the front door. The apartment smells strangely new; I know it won't last long. In a cold shudder, I enter your domain. You sleep on the couch in the front room. You live on the couch in the front room. I've lost track of the years; the layers of dust that cocoon your tightly-sealed cello case which rests in the corner. You're going to practice something new tomorrow. You promise me. You promise.

You sleep. Ears twitching. A dream of escape that you won't remember upon waking. I measure the tempo of your ear muscles. It's in time with a repetitious crackling. The record has spun its final revolution. Or maybe its first.

I trot over towards the player. I reach my hoof to the crackling, skipping, repeating disc. Like a heartbeat. I consider stopping it. I should just stop it.

But I freeze my hoof in place. I linger upon one of the many frozen summits, before and behind. I see her—the host of the spectre I talk to—standing on that stage in a bakery full of screaming yokels. I don't know why I'm in love with you, but the best and worst outcome is that I might stand to find out. Instead of simply to love.

And...

What else is there for us now?

The record keeps skipping. I pace my hooves up the stairs in time to mask it. Not that it makes any difference to you. To us.

I'm a coward. I'm a glutton. I'm a jailer. But at least that's something.

But without you...?

Maybe...

Maybe time will sort it out. Give it enough time... and I'm sure it will work it all out.

I shower. I sleep. I should be screaming. Someday, we will both be screaming.

But only once we've deserved it.

Author's Note:

Comments

[OmicroniX]

Always nice to read another of yours, SSAE. I’m continually astounded by your range as a writer

[FanOfMostEverything]

I'm not sure if this is a cry for help, a lament at creative stagnation, a condemnation of one-note characterization of background ponies, or just Skirts being Skirts.

[Samey90]

10889855
All of the above?

[Keebroo]

It can feel like a betrayal to who they were to accept who they are, as though all the memories will disappear or lose their meaning if the person in them doesn’t exist anymore. But I have found nothing more difficult than believing in a ghost that I can look in the eye.

[Alicorn Capony]

Stagnation is bad when you're stuck in a bad place. Change can bring only good. But what if you were stuck in a good place? Then stagnation would be good, and change bad.

It's too bad there are far more ways for things to be bad than there are for them to be good.

[Gay For Gadot]

One of the few second-person stories that I was happy to read. Very evocative and immersive. Great work, Skirts.

[Vaguely Demented]

Kinda seems like this is what would come about a year or two after the end of “The Graduate”.

[Shortsighted Fan]

Feels like an extended chapter from Things Tavi Says. Almost like a prologue. I like it.

[Ice Star]

The pacing on this had a great ebb to this, though I have to echo everyone else about the evocative flow of how used language here. Maybe this is a vent fic, or a warmup to try and ease into the spirit for an upcoming project. However you intended it, this story was successful.

Based Arcade Fire reference too.