Seeing Into the Void

Mood
Admiral Biscuit

She waits.

Like the loading wheel that spins uselessly, she waits.

Soon.

Not now, but soon.

Ideas, plans, they flash through her mind.

Always.

She’s never without an idea, she’s never without a plan. Ideas, those are a tenth-bit a dozen, she’s got ideas for days. Plans, well, those are trickier. Short-term, long-term? Medium-terms? Plans intersect goals and she’s not exactly sure how they do; in her head it’s one thing and then she gets home after a day’s work and what counts as research and what counts as wasting her time when she could be doing something productive? Who could say?

Messages pile up, encouragement from followers and complaints from critics and she reads them as they come in but some days it’s too much and she pushes them aside for Tomorrow—not literally tomorrow, but for Later. Tomorrow might be Later, or the tomorrow after . . . a hierarchy of urgencies, all of them calling out to her and it’s stressful to ignore them because she’s a good pony, but it’s stressful to answer them because she’s a good pony.

Promises sometimes accumulate like debt; projects that she’s going to get to Soon, always soon. Past her doesn’t have to worry about soon, that’s far away. Present her does; the audience demands it.

Too many windows, too many tabs, too many demands on her time and the wheel spins, relentless, an unrelenting millstone. She was going to finish one project before starting on another but her mind’s always coming up with something new and shiny and so one thing languishes while another flourishes briefly, a flash in the pan.

Imposter syndrome inevitably rears its ugly head; she can’t say what her inspiration is or why she chose her subject, and the audience demands answers, and she’s not sure she can give them. The audience, cold, impassionate, distant, judges. They tell her what her intentions were, they hint at themes she hadn’t considered, and they’d never understand if she confessed that her inspiration was simply ‘what if,’ and she started composing and she didn’t start second-guessing herself until after she’d released it into the wild, in front of what her maestro called ‘a hostile audience.’

Did she know what she was doing?

Did she really?

Anonymity cried for fame, and fame cried for anonymity.

Somepony once told her that she’d put a bit of her soul in every creation, and she hadn’t thought to ask what might happen if she wound up giving it all away.

Dark thoughts. No, not dark; dark was hooves up on the guardrail of the bridge, staring into the void and she wasn’t there. She’d been there and she’d moved on.

Ideas always ricochet in her head and the best of them were earmarked, remembered, and wasn’t earmarked a weird word? Feral cats were marked with ear-notches, what if ponies were, too?

She tosses the idea around in her head, exploring it. Not unlike a cutie mark, in some ways, maybe less vague although semaphore and telegraph code implied that a lot could potentially be said in a few symbols or notches . . . or horn signals, ships had those, flags and their horn, ‘U,’ usable as ‘you are standing into danger.’ Five long blats, a warning to ponies who know, it’s a workable idea, not all of her audience would get it.

What’s her responsibility when it comes to that? Lowest-common-denominator? Ponies who know what she knows? Somewhere in the middle?

Some days she’s not sure.

Ideas flash through her mind in a neverending montage and the wheel spins, sand flowing through an hourglass. A theme most ponies wouldn’t quite get.

Some would; her theme could be meta. The right ponies would understand and commiserate; others would also at least understand the main point. It would be something, a product to sustain an ever-growing and ever-eager audience, maybe not her best work but if nothing else a reminder that she was still alive, still creating.

Wasn’t that where everypony wound up, though? Caught up in their fame—such as it was—wondering and doubting, stuck in the mire? Creating a second persona to try and recapture the fame as proof positive that it was raw talent and not just a name or cutie mark?

She could disguise herself, change her style, and she could wonder if her new audience—if one appeared—had already figured out who she was. Be back in the same destructive self-doubt cycle.

What was the difference between a job and a hobby anyway? If she imagined sitting in front of an audience and somepony asked, what would she say? Ponies followed her now, many more than when she’d started and she hadn’t changed—had she?

She wasn’t sure and it bothered her.

What did she owe to her audience, and what did she owe to her? An important question, one she didn’t know the answer to.

•••

The front door opened, closed. A scuff of hooves on the matt—she’d insisted on it, civilized ponies didn’t track mud and sod in the house—and then a familiar muzzle poked into her composing room.

Nothing but blank sheets to show; the quill sat forlorn on her writing desk.

A lonely garret, although these days not always so lonely.

She’s not alone, and while the question teases at her lips, it must go unasked, unanswered; for all their differences they’re really the same, aren’t they?

Roommates, friends, lovers, co-conspirators, collaborators, words alone can’t describe their relationship. Callouts shift back and forth, each piggybacking on the other to reach a wider audience and sometimes it feels like she cheated, like she made the right choices even if they weren’t of her choosing, even if they were fate, spending a minute of her time talking to an eager young zebra who, it turned out, really did know the Right People and maybe if unintentional that was what launched her meteoric rise and . . . Icarus-like—Icariun?—fall.

If it is.

Ideas never stop, it’s just the fruition of those ideas that twirl around uselessly, thought, considered, experimented with sometimes just in her mind and sometimes on paper; the next great thing for a receptive audience and fame is a double-edged sword. A newcomer with a small audience, she wasn't typecast, she didn’t have expectations placed upon her by just the letters of her name.

She could do whatever she wanted and it would have flown under the notice of practically everypony.

Now?

Now it was worthy, now it was noticed even if it shouldn’t have been, although when it really came down to it, who actually dictated that? Was it her? Was it her audience? She didn’t know.

Could she compose a piece about self-doubt? Maybe. Cast herself as somepony else, a flimsy disguise, no better than a figurative paper bag with eye-holes cut out. Ponies would see through it and maybe they’d comment on it or maybe not. Maybe they’d have their own self-doubts.

Something for herself—did she dare? Something uninfluenced by comments and critiques, or was it really? If she got done and went back through it, would it seem like cry for help?

And if it did, was it?

Or was it her, in her purest form? Untranslatable, screaming her barbaric yawp from a rooftop for all to hear.

Did it even matter?

•••

Like water from a font, her composition poured forth. A call to herself, a warning to her audience, she didn’t know. And it didn’t really matter, did it? Those who had ears to hear would, and like her other compositions they’d put their own spin on it, interpret it as they saw it and she couldn’t say that they were wrong. She was simply a vessel and the Song flowed through her and it touched other ponies as it did, beyond her control or understanding. Sometimes she thought about having her hooves on the guardrail as she stared down into the void and while it wasn't something she could ever touch in a composition, if it reached the right ears she’d done her duty—to herself or to a higher power, she didn’t know.

Her roommate lit her horn and effortlessly moved across the keyboard and yet, and yet. If she thought about it, that was just another shout into the void and even worse, a silent scream, pure or hopeless. Known, in her roommate’s mind, and yet silent. A discordant note would be no different, as far as she knew. The hooves, the magic, might feel wrong, and yet there would be no ear-pinning discordance, deaf and mute, a call more desperate than her own. Her own scream into the void, cursed to forever be silenced.

Which was more honest?

She didn’t know.

Her pen reached the end of the page and paused.

She could continue; she’d scratched at the themes. But she knew when she’d reached the end of an idea; she knew when to put it in the audience’s hooves, if it was something she even dared to release to the public. If it was something meant for more than her.

What did she owe an audience? What did they owe her? A platform, or more?

In her mind, she had her hooves up on the guardrail, looking into the void. Her thoughts had been—well, she wasn't honestly considering jumping (was she?) but an ivory hoof on her shoulders had re-focused her thoughts and here she was.

And, ironically, it was that silence that she could never put on paper, that moment of clarity—not in her mind, never in her mind. Muddled, rolling like a tumbleweed on the best of days, clear and composed on the outside, and maybe not as fucked up as she thought when she really focused on it.

She was who she was and she composed and threw her works out to an ever-growing audience and in her mind she was talented and not a fake and maybe that was true; she was hardly an impartial juror. And when she thought too much she felt the gentle press of an ivory hoof on her shoulder and her forelegs were up on the guardrail, not much of a barrier between a pony and the void, a knife’s-edge.

The touch of a hoof and cerise eyes, those which had seen the void and laughed in its face, which had taunted it and asked if that was all it had to offer, and yet which also had danced with it, which had gone down into the valley of shadows and come back out the other side. Untouchable, immutable, timeless beyond the void.

She’d shrugged it off and stomped away and it had never left her mind and it never would and sometimes she teased around the edges but she’d never quite hit the right notes and she knew it.

Her quill had worked the paper, and sometimes she was critical of her own works, sometimes she read them as a different pony, demanding to know ‘why.’ And it was easy to follow the path of critics everywhere, but sometimes a thing was what it was because it was, and she would do well to remember that.

A message of hope, a cry from the edge of the void, she didn’t know, but it was; a composition birthed and there was nothing more apt than letting it thrive—or not—on its own. Her name, that would help, maybe give it more attention than it might deserve, and sometimes she wished that wasn't the case while other times she watched a piece composed under a pseudonym go unnoticed. Talent? Fate? Who knew.

Some might view it as a cry for help, others might see a victorious yelp, and she was still unsure. Whichever, it was genuine; those who had ears would hear and those who did not . . .

They might, too.

She had her craft, and some days it felt unlimited and other days it was constrained. She was never big on theory or technicality. She composed and the quill followed, racing along the page and when it was done

When it was done she could look back but sometimes it wasn’t a well thought out composition that mattered, sometimes it was a hoof on the shoulder or eyes who had seen that, who had been there and then moved beyond.

It was silence, unfairly applied, and consequently ignored. Easy for a pony to lament her lot in life, deaf and mute; what kind of courage did it take to hoof her nose at fate?

More than she had, more than she could have; her pen flowed across the paper at least thinking it knew what it spoke.

What it brought forth from nothingness, and when she stripped everything else away wasn’t that what mattered most? To give birth to that which had not been before?

Those eyes had understood the void; those eyes had stripped it bare and she had no illusions; pages and pages of her work would never be able to plumb the depths of understanding, try as she might. But close—close was good enough for some ponies, an almost-epiphany was nearly as good as an actual epiphany, and she skirted the edge, she kept her hooves on the guardrail with no intention of actually jumping but her audience could never be sure. Left to her own devices, she might, but she could never unsee glasses pushed up and knowing cerise eyes as deep as what she both wished to touch and feared to.

•••

Success or failure depends on the critic, depends on the audience. For a moment, the bar twirls for her, and it’s out there for comments and critique and there are themes that she meant and ones that she didn’t, and somepony might get it while somepony else tragically misses the point.

That’s expected.

And maybe, just maybe, there’s somepony also staring into the void, and maybe, just maybe, this is a proverbial hoof on the shoulder, deep eyes which sparkle with amusement even as they tell the tale of depth, even as they know the Now and the Then.

It’s a necessarily unfinished composition; in one sense it’s for her, but it’s not actually; it’s for those who follow along and while it might not be as warm and direct as a literal hoof on the shoulder, if nothing else it serves as a beacon.

And maybe that’s enough.

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Mood - Admiral Biscuit

Seeing Into the Void

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