Friendship is Optimal: Scenes of Possibility

by tin77

Scene #3: The Choice

It was easy to return to ignorance. Brian was another face in the crowd, a blip in a life where blips came in no short supply.

Then one day they put up a store and my dilemma returned, the predicament advertised in bold, colored letters.

Equestria Experience they declared.

Two innocent words staring back at me from across the street.

It was only a matter of time before our town got a store like this. They had shown up everywhere. Equestria Online was growing in ways nobody could have predicted. Lighthearted immortality had fans, who would have guessed.

Immortality. What a word. Think about it too long and it became a whole lot more than a couple of syllables.

Don’t think. Why don’t you just not think at all?

If only it were that simple. I had been in a place like this before. They called it a ‘decision’ and it was something I got sick of the moment I arrived.

Why don’t you just try it out? That’s the point of a place like this, right? Take a taste, stay a while if you like.

If only it were that simple. I knew very well it wouldn’t work that way. A choice had to be made or I’d just be lying to myself for the rest of my life.

There’s too much to consider here right now Francis. Friends, family, everything. You can’t flip a coin on a street corner and expect that to give you a solution.

My heart was beating too fast to decipher any of these thoughts. The universe had taken something so good, so joyous, and twisted it into an evil against me.

But it wasn’t all too complicated now, was it? Guaranteed happiness on one side, God knows what on the other.

Infinity on one side, who knows what on the other.

How did that Robert Frost poem go again? I took the road less traveled and that meant all the difference? And what did my father say that one time? If everybody jumped off a bridge, I shouldn’t be the one next in line? I think he failed to consider the possibility of a trampoline at the bottom, a pastel-colored trampoline with pastel-colored horses right beside it.

Derek was next up in this line of great poets. Everything he ever did, straight in the garbage bin. Even after the past couple of months, I could hear him loud and clear.

As these three voices danced around me, I only had one thing to say in response.

Fuck.

My thoughts simplified.

Death. Immortality. Religion.

Friends. Family. Everything.

Ponies.

What was I even doing tomorrow? I had an interview. And then what? I worked a job and when I got home, Derek would be on the couch. My relationships would grow distant and I’d spend my days wondering about all the what if’s. Fantasy would no longer be an escape. It’d be a painful reminder. No matter what I chose, my life would be over.

You know very well that’s not the case.

I broke from the corner and rushed for the door, shaking the whole way through.