Monachopsis
Monachopsis:
n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
I was a birthday gift.
Not the kind that you get surrounded by your family, with balloons and streamers and cake crumbs on the floor, but the kind that tears into the night alongside screams of pain muted only by thunder and the relentless, relentless rain; the kind of agony that drives a young colt from his home in fear, unable to understand, only to find a puppy in the ditch at the front of the house, as cold and scared and alone as he was.
And when he ran back in, his sister had arrived, and she was also cold and scared – though much less alone, with both parents standing over her and a few tired-looking midwifes around – and everyone gets wrapped up in blankets and warm and safe, and everything begins.
It was a terrifying night, as far as I can remember. While I do not remember my mother or father, or siblings or first master, I remember the bangs of carriage wheels moving too fast over loose stone, and the bangs of anger as objects were thrown and words were shouted, and so I have always been scared of thunder. Perhaps that was why I didn’t struggle or fight when I was found; I was so scared that only someone else that scared could have helped me.
Being carried by an unknown person – no, an unknown child – through a storm that would later be classified as one of the worst ones to hit the area in a century, while both of you are terrified to the end of your wits and soaked to the bone is not something I would recommend.
But I was dried and warmed and fed alongside the other newest family member, and so we became honorary sisters and I became a part of their lives. I don’t remember many things from then, at least not in detail; hot summer days spent chasing sticks and running through the orchard with my new family, standing guard over lit candles inside pumpkins while my brother and sister worked on their costumes and the air grew sharp and hinted at winter, and winter itself arriving in a thick white haze during which my new mother – she wasn’t quite new by then, but I still saw her as such – opened up all of the wonderful jams and jellies she had made in the spring before my arrival and my new father kept a hot, healthy fire in the hearth to chase away the cold.
And then spring came, along with my honorary first birthday and my sister’s full one, and the apple trees were in bloom and the squirrels were fat and lazy from the new heat and food after their long sleeps in the snow and things were good. Mother’s coat hadn’t gotten sickly, yet, but there had been a strange tang to her scent that I had thought might have been from winter that stuck stubbornly to her skin and her clothes. But now her coat was a faint gold, her mane green like apples and shadows, and her eyes yellow and bright as the sun; father never took her strange, sick scent, but his coat was a deep red and his mane yellow as straw, with a freckly white blaze down the middle of his face and white socks on each ankle, and his green eyes were strong and loving.
My brother looked like him, nearly a spitting image; his mane was a little bit darker, and his coat a little bit lighter, and where his father had white socks his own were gold like his mother, but his green eyes shared the same intensity and care, especially when he was watching over his sister. She was short, stocky, and blunt. Where her brother was all legs and neck, she had put all of her size into sheer muscle, her orange-gold coat glossy and her mane bleached to sand by the summer sun, her cheeks and nose marked with a few white freckles. She was bright and beautiful, and he and I often worked together to keep her safe.
When the sun dipped below the horizon, we withdrew to the small and cozy house, and tended to the fire, and grandmother would place a disc on a strange machine and it would play music, and mother and father would dance for hours while brother and sister took turns trying to come up with dances of their own, tiring themselves long before mother and father dipped their heads together and closed their eyes, their love soft and golden in the warmth of their home and their family.
I should make it clear I knew I was never one of them. I was much smaller, and my legs did not end in hooves, but rather paws, and my coat was rather uniform instead of having the long mane and tail like my family – though my sister often put clips in it like perhaps it was – and I was brown and white in paint-like splotches instead of my family’s uniform colors, but we were family nonetheless.
With spring came a startling conclusion; I was going to be very much alone. My brother and sister went off in the mornings to learn with other fillies and colts, and my mother and father worked the farm until they returned. I busied myself with many important things, like chasing rabbits and barking at other ponies who came on the property, both of which I was very good at.
And that’s what I was doing on the hottest day in summer, when the apples were thick on the trees and cicadas buzzed long into the night. I was barking at a pony who looked very out-of-place walking up the cart-worn path to the house.
Had I known how much trouble he would be, perhaps I would have tried scaring him off instead of just alerting my family to his arrival. He walked almost cautiously, like he was afraid of the dirt touching his feet (which, looking back, he probably was) and only jolted his head up when I sounded his arrival. His eyes were brown and dark, and his mane matched. His coat was similar to my mothers’, though, and perhaps that is why I didn’t chase him off.
“Hush, Winona, I see him.” Father shouted, slamming his back hooves into a tree trunk with more anger than he usually spent on inanimate objects. The apples fell neatly into the buckets he had set out, a trick I had never quite understood and had not been able to replicate; paws made feeble impacts even with the best of kicks. “What brings you here, Flip?”
“It’s Mr. Change,” the stallion replied, sounding much more haughty than he had a right to be on someone else’s territory. “And I’m here to see Mrs. Apple.”
“Caramel’s busy cleaning out the pantry for this year’s harvest,” Father replied curtly, walking over. “And seeing as she married me, I believe you could speak to me instead.”
Mr. Change seemed quite unnerved with the larger stallion standing in front of him. I didn’t envy him at that point; he was city folk, and Father might as well have been animate stone compared to the slicked-back newcomer. “Mr. Oak, this is a private matter that I would like to discuss with Mrs. Apple. Alone.”
“I don’t know how you do things in Manehattan, Mr. Change, but here on the Acres we Apples don’t do things in private.”
“Yes, I can tell,” Flip said, curling his lip in disgust. “You act like common savages.”
Father did his best not to show it, but I caught the subtle change in his stance; he settled a bit more on to his back legs, and his nostrils flared just a bit more than usual. “This is Apple land, Flip, and you can respect Apple traditions or you can leave.”
Perhaps he remembered who he was talking to, or perhaps he saw mother walking down the path behind father, but the city stallion eased back and smiled in a half-grimace way. “The way things are going, it won’t be Apple land for very long.”
Mother walked up beside him, then, looking a slight bit more tired than she should have for doing the dishes. “Dear, is there something you needed?”
Next to father’s hard edges and firm presence, she was soft and seemed as if she would blow away any moment. It had always surprised me, seeing as he was the one who had been married into the Apple family; he took their morals to heart and acted the same as any pony who had been born into them. Mother had never fit in with them. Perhaps she was a city pony at heart. I won’t lie, there are times when I’m checking on them at night and she is awake, in her room, putting on makeup and jewelry in the candlelight, but I cannot speak of that to my family and I never would betray her. She is just as strong as the rest of them, on the inside.
“Mrs. Apple, you’ve been missing payments on the farm. You’re three months behind.” Flip pulled a stack of papers from his saddlebags in a haze of brown magic the color of dirt that could not hold a harvest. I had missed his horn due to his styled-up forelock; I had not met a unicorn before, but some deep instinct told me that was what he was. “You’ll see that you should have at least marked in the budget for this year on the third sheet, and sent in the appropriate receipts for the harvest on the tenth.”
“The apples aren’t even off of the trees yet, Mr. Change. We won’t have this information for another month, at least.” I was never sure if she tried to look as fragile as she did that day, but she leaned into Oak’s shoulder like she couldn’t stand. “It’s been a harsh year, with the kids growing up and all. I just haven’t had time.”
I inched closer to father’s other side. He wasn’t good with numbers, not that he’d ever admit it, and business talk confused him. He just did the farm work, and grandmother and mother would figure out the paperwork.
“Does that dog have proper tags?” Flip asked, maintaining his levitation of the papers while mother read through them. “You know all dogs within Ponyville limits need to have tags, right?”
“Haven’t had time to get her some,” Father replied, tone sharp. “Her name is Winona.”
“I’ll use her name when I can read it on her neck, Mr. Oak.”
“The payments and paperwork should be in by the end of the week,” Mother interrupted, her voice genuine and soft. “I believe that wait will not be a problem? After all, you’ve been so kind in waiting this long.”
“I leave for Manehattan on Saturday, and I’ll be staying in the rental home on Orchard Avenue. I want my paperwork no later than Friday morning, but I suppose you can mail the money to my office later if you’re too... busy to do it before I leave.” He dropped the papers without warning, and Mother had to quickly grab them in her mouth before they scattered on the ground. “Mrs. Apple, Mr. Oak. Good day.”
The rest of the day had seemed to pass in a haze. I stayed with mother while she filled out the forms Flip had left her, all too aware of how her eyes would sometimes drift off of the page, or her pen would drift off of the edge of a blank box and leave a winding black river trail down the side of the paper until it tapped against her hooves; looking back now I imagine they looked less like rivers and more like cracks, chasms, the first signs we were falling apart on the very things that may have started it.
I could not speak, but I could press close to her and hope that it was enough.
I didn't know of the things that happened off of the farm. The idea that apples were sold, and that selling made money, and that money paid for the land and the tools - and, only a few days later, the tag around my neck that bore my name, as my sister had been terrified that I would be taken no matter how much I tried to reassure her that I would never leave - were all beyond me. I knew the apples came from the trees, and my family were the ones that collected them, and that some of them were eaten and some were saved for seeds, and that some of them were loaded up and taken into town. The idea that anything happened to them once they left the fence was there, assuredly, but it was not information I really knew what to do with. Things beyond the fence did not vanish forever, as my brother and sister returned every afternoon that they had left, but I did not think about the apples.
I did think about the strange stallion, with his magic, and his papers - so unlike the bound papers that my family told stories from or held pictures in! - and the deep, weaving lines of a pen left to bleed out.
I had nightmares of those lines running from the page, into the house itself, tearing it in two and having everything I held dear swirl into the depths, roaring like the storm that was the first thing I ever knew. Things that made things unmade them, and that storm made me and my sister. I wished, in that roundabout way where you don't really want to know the answer, that I knew what had made my brother, my mother, and my father, so perhaps I could guard them from their unmaking as well.
I did not think then, and do not think now, that sickness is what brought mother into the world. But that is what crept in, with a sickeningly sweet rotting smell, an apple made blackened and twisted by nothing but the passage of time. I did not have an understanding for what mother was bearing unseen, but learned in time to call it terrible.
That strange stallion came back many times, always drawing mother out from the shelter of the house and into the sweet summer wind that seemed as though it unraveled her every time it caught a stray lock of her mane. Every time there was something for him to criticize, in his harsh stance and cruel tone, and every time father bit back his anger to keep mother steady, and every time I watched him go past the fence and into the world I did not know and wished that I could find what unmade him.
But I didn't, for mother. She was weakened, fragile, rotting as a tree does from the inside out. My brother was competent enough to pick up her slack, and my sister making her first forays into harvests of her own, that it seemed like it would be okay, even if she was slow to move most days, and slept whenever her attention drifted, and what movement she did make was accompanied by hisses of pain under her breath.
I did not have words to tell the others with. I did all I could, and I stayed by her side. I was her constant companion, a task made hauntingly easier by her lessened movement. She did not accompany my siblings past the fence in the mornings. My brother brought them both home. When the apples went past the fence, grandmother accompanied father more often than mother did. There were times when I knew father spent much longer in the fields than he had to, to keep from seeing mother as she grew worse; she might have noticed, and she might not have. There was a palpable uncertainty in the air, broken only on the nights when mother seemed bright and clear and beautiful, and father pressed close to her side and slept in her room instead of on the couch to avoid waking her with the gentle, golden dawn.
I loved them all, dearly, through everything.
Though it was not unlike the day I was born, mother did not die in a storm. She died in a birth; uncomplicated, healthy, crying over her new daughter, and then looking into father's eyes as if they had been dancing, and the needle on the record had begun skipping on the edge of the track.
I never faulted her for leaving. I wished for years, whenever I would look out the window for a mare I expected to see, whenever I turned the corner and saw an empty room, when the jars of apple jam were brought out in winter and there was an empty seat at the table - I wished that I had known the words to tell her that I did not blame her, that I loved her, that I would forever hold the weight of her passing but would give up the world if it meant the pain did not have to stay on her shoulders.
I do not have the words. I have never had them. My mouth was not made for their language, and what my body can attempt is a ghost of the communication they had. I let her know in the purest way I could that I forgave her; I became the vessel for her family's grief.
It lingered years past my own, until my newest sister could ask the questions about her past herself. I was the constant; I ventured past the fence to bring my brother and sister to their school, and ran home once they were safe to spend the day between grandmother in the house and father in the field. Nights were spent at the foots of different beds, petted by different hooves, sobbed into by different voices. I did not have the words to reassure them, so I bore their grief in silence, and showed only joy in return.
It was autumn, quiet, with a gentle rain on the windows and the house warmed by a cooking oven, when my younger sister asked. I heard the thunder across the fields that they did not, and feared for my undoing, but I was their vessel, though that night they turned their grief to the air and, slowly, let it leave them, hissing up the chimney like smoke on a doused fire.
The storm broke elsewhere. All the farm got was rain, and after, only the sun.
I learned, later, through snippets of conversation between father and grandmother - and later still, my brother - that something had happened to that strange unicorn, and his son had taken over his position. I met him only once, when he was introducing himself; when an unsteady colt and a short, snorting filly stopped him at the gate, he simply bent his head to them and asked to see father, instead of pushing past, and I fetched him. His name carried a lighter tone in the household than his father's, and he did not break up farm work with visits like his father had, though he sent mail. Slowly, I learned he too had been raised on an orchard, with his mother, and understood the often tenuous grips on finances that came before a harvest was completed. The tension that built in the house each year with the end of summer eased the stubborn grip it had held for all of the lifetime I'd known it.
One day, father took notice of the black marks on the table where ink had stained it years ago. He stood beside the table for a while, alone - as grandmother was in the kitchen, making her preserves, and my siblings had all left for school - except for me.
"I suppose these aren't the best reminders, are they?" He said, so softly I could have convinced myself I imagined it. His hoof went, out of habit, to my head, and I willed my strength to flow into him as he stared into those black marks, a lifeline to keep him from falling, often used and never fraying.
We stood like that for a while before he had the courage to move on, and he spent the night carefully cleaning, admirable in his dedication. If he could, I expect he would have drawn the rag between the very atoms to get that seeping darkness out; but even without the ability he seemed no less intent on trying.
We all noticed the marks had gone when we first looked at the place, a habit nobody would admit they had fallen into. He hung her photo on the wall, with the family before her, and over time we grew more accustomed to her gentle smile out of the corner of our eyes than to bowing our heads to remember a stain.
It's something that can be spoken lightly of, now; if I could have told the story as I lived it, you may never reach the end for how many words my grief would span. But it was over, and I loved her, and she was gone, and so we moved forward. It did not mean we were forgetting, though I knew my brother and sister - and I, though my younger sister was too young to know what she never could - feared we were; the memory was always there, light and stubborn as a shadow, but it was something that could be faced.
The years passed, hazy and golden. My brother and sister grew older, blossoming through foalhood into capable and reliable adults. My sister brought me with her beyond the fence often, now, and so I suppose I would have had something of a metamorphosis myself. I did not know the world could have so many people in it - a part of me longed for others of my kind, but I could not pretend the comfort of my family was not enough - and my years as my sister's keeper are some of my happiest.
In these golden years, father passed away. My younger sister was lost in grief, but the rest of the family knew how to take it in stride. This was not an unexpected event, and so there was a calmness that came from knowing before it happened; a grief born early and borne early, so that it was fed and complacent by the time it was due. Life carried on.
Life carried on, and time carried on. My siblings were stronger now, and able to handle themselves. I did not have to bear their burdens any longer, and with that came a release of my own grief that I had no longer realized I had been carrying. Mother and father had died, and I missed them as any child would miss their parent, but I could seek comfort with my siblings instead of having them need me. I could rest in the golden sunshine with grandmother and let the day slip by without a thought to how I needed to ease the pain of the passing hours.
Once, perhaps, my story would have ended with a death; something to tie up all of the loose ends, and mirror my childhood into that of my younger sister's. For a long, long while, I thought it would. But like grief, or perhaps because of it, healing comes with time. I know that spilled ink still lingers in the corners I have yet to find, but for now, the sun is bright and it is beautiful, and I am alive, and I am suddenly, beautifully at home.