Trapped in a room inside an empty room
Twilight Sparkle was lonely[1].
She had tried organizing some time with one of her friends. Everypony was busy with some obligation or another[2], or doing their weekly charity work[3], or training for some recently invented competition[4], or incapable of providing companionship beyond open articulation about the concerns inherent in an upcoming dinner social[5], or were impossible to find simply because of an abhorrent chaos principle that refused to succumb to either magic or logic[6]. And anyway, time with her friends wasn’t what Twilight wanted.
But the illusion of this desire always appeared as Twilight felt the ‘loneliness’ beginning to manifest inside her. It was more a sensation of her body than anything mental—while she was aware of the yearning for companionship—and, more than that, to simply feel wanted, to feel like a pivotal part of the uncaring tempest that forced ponies through their mundane and dreary lives. She wanted another pony to make her feel like this—and though she and her friends had saved the world and cemented their place in the destiny of an entire nation, Twilight still felt like a pebble at the bottom of an infinite pool. She felt as though no matter how many ponies she was surrounded with, the truth of her perception would never let her escape the feeling that she was well and truly abandoned in the middle of an existential nightmare.
Twilight wanted so many things her brain was incapable of co-rationalizing them. She wanted an intellectual companionship, somepony she could discuss the theories of magic with, great works of Equestrian literature and other fascinating ephemera of life as an intellectual. Twilight wanted physical companionship, so crass and base she always treated it as a non-entity, until she felt the tug of it at night, when she curled into herself and yearned for something more than the various flickers of magic she’d adapted over the years to caress the parts of her that were made to be caressed. Twilight wanted anything to take her away from the feeling that life was a gradually expiring reservoir of sand, and she was only a ghost in the hourglass until she really, truly mattered to somepony else. Until somepony else mattered to her that way. And that was all.
Getting out of bed was impossible. The sky outside was a mirror of Twilight’s empty heart. The second she left her room, she would die. Twilight knew this was true and it seemed to her both logical and self-evident.
Spike didn’t seem to know what to do when Twilight got this lonely, but luckily he was young and easily directed, and therefore could be sent away and/or coerced into not informing Twilight Sparkle’s friends that she’d been crying for seven hours straight and could not be compelled to utter a single world not tinged by the guttural wrack of her continued sobbing.
After a while, you began to suspect the feeling must be fraudulent. Twilight lie in her room and clenched her pillow and retraced the steps of her rationalization. Essentially, because she was incapable of experiencing anything but the feeling of her entire essence being a gash in the permanence of emotional relevance, Twilight had concluded at various points that this single-state manner of experiencing the world must not yield correct observational data. Which meant Twilight’s perception was not one to be trusted. Which meant decisions were all to be questioned.
This was the path down one spire of doubt. Twilight sniffed hard and tasted the several hours residue of salty liquid and mucus that had built up in her sinuses.
The problem was that Twilight was rational[7]. She knew that flood of neurochemical antagonism that caused her to coast comatose through whole days must be something shared in the world, perhaps even to manageable degrees, and so there would be commonality and answers and hope and Twilight wanted to believe in all of those things.
There was a whole network of ponies desperate to die attached to something. Twilight liked the way the infrastructure of the services she signed up for (mostly post-managed, match anonymously, prohibitively expensive) were based almost entirely on metrics and invisible statistics. Twilight could peruse the critical bullet points essential to a proverbial ‘soul-mate’, and eliminate unsatisfactory matches until her psychological longing was quelled. Of course, because Twilight Sparkle’s neurotic nature was one of the key features of her developing depression and anxiety, it overwhelmed her ability to accept even a single flaw in any potential mate, and so finally Twilight had scaled her expectations to lower-tier dating services, then speed dating meetings (which she signed up for and paid for in full but never attended), coffee shops, bars, and finally the chance that somepony would find a way in her insular prison of a bedroom and whisk her away into the oblivion of a final sweet single happy emotion, no matter whether they happened to match her one bit or not.
It was because of this that when Caramel had asked Twilight on a date, she had agreed, and then masturbated three times when she got home, before crying and cutting herself for the first time in four years, along the inside of her left hind leg, where the scar was mostly invisible, but the finely sharpened blade she used with the aid of her magic had sunken so deeply and efficiently into her flesh it was a wonder the blood had ever stopped, and Celestia had it hurt, and she remembered all the reasons she had ever hurt herself, and how much of a relief it felt to be in control of something, not overwhelmed by her desires, quick, still inescapably shameful physical relief or emotional companionship, the reason her mother and father had sent her to a therapist when she was in middle school, where she’d told Dr. Trotsvin about how she felt incapable of everything, because she was so aware of the potential of the world and how like a scattered electron she was in the scheme of causality, and also none of this had mattered and nothing had really anyway until she’d mentioned how she and Shining Armor sometimes shared a bed at night, and how she had learned things from him that to this day she knew were premature and ugly but were now inextricably burned onto her perceptions of everything that mattered between one pony and another: love, sex, or even the simple notion of a touch—a shared silence—a gesture, always through the lens that her brother had given her—that Dr. Trotsvin had panicked to shatter, but was incapable of seeing was cast forever over everything, like a thin sheen or film that Twilight could feel on her and in her at all times, and how even now as she forced herself out of bed, her chest seizing like needles were puncturing her with each breath, she was sure the act of this other pony across from her, his stature and skeletal structure and so many features obviously ‘male’ that Twilight would expect things of him more unconsciously than she could ever articulate, and this was the secret weaving of all tragedy, Twilight suspected, but would never admit, because that would mean her forgiveness for her brother would be a lie, and that was something not worth thinking about, and anyway it was time to go now.
Getting out of bed and prepared to go on what Twilight had eventually defined as a date was a complex process of uncountable intangible processes. Firstly, Twilight engaged in an infinite[8] debate with herself on the merits and demerits to her self-assigned task; she proposed the undermining of all action due to the futility of existence, then counterpointed from a position she could never fully agree with, but was required to explore for the sake of a completely air-tight and infallible argument, and therefore this process repeated in the helix of itself until eventually the surprise of her body’s neurochemical and biological relationship on the basis of survival and the infinitesimally minute fragment of a fraction of a sub-sub-sub-atomic speck of hope that said there might be some relief to the fatigue of being—to the wall of separation between consciousness and otherness that could never be reconciled, or maybe it could, and that was the whole point, and so Twilight was going to get up and go to Caramel’s house and have coffee with him, but she wasn’t going to prepare her appearance in any way shape or form, because the motivation to be concerned about how she looked to the world of what were essentially separate-forever-husks roaming through the narrative of her cloaked and hidden loss of any positive emotion within her had long fled, and any idea of it now was only a joke of a memory that was so far absent even its true principles were unknown, and the concepts of ‘fashion’ and ‘appeal’ seemed ridiculous, because no one could be capable of want in a universe this uncaring, but anyway if she didn’t bother to dress up Caramel might more fully ogle her naked body anyway and therefore get aroused and want to have sex with her and maybe that would be something like not wanting to be swallowed by the nothing-blessed-void of sleep forever.
Twilight sighed as she shut the door to her bedroom. In the commentary of her mind, she refused to allow the sigh to be significant.
To abate the insistence of any real appetite during her date, Twilight forced herself to eat three oranges and a half a head of lettuce, with some type of vinaigrette dressing that she found ultimately sour and unpleasant, as though it had spoiled. Spike was out for the day doing chores on the Apple Family Farm, likely[9] due to his burgeoning crush on Applebloom, now that Rarity had fully, firmly, and maturely rejected his advances for all the obvious reasons[10], so Twilight had no obligation to inform him of where she was going. She had no need to exercise the regular mask of her emotive facial expressions that assured her closest companion and all the rest of the world that there was still a glimmer of what happiness could be felt like inside her. But she smiled anyway, for practice, as she locked the front door and began the short walk to Caramel’s.
Unpleasantly, the distance from departure to destination elapsed in what felt like only a minute or two[11], which meant Twilight still felt unprepared more so than her everpresent state of unpreparedness. Before she knocked on the Caramel’s front door (which was a mix of blue and brown, again unpleasant, though Twilight noted even in her reaction to its chromatic repellence that she so seldom cared even the slightest bit about aesthetics, and what this might say about her attitude going into the date, and how it might already be a guaranteed failure, and she thought all of this with her hoof paused in mid-air before it descended), Twilight mentally rehearsed everything she knew about Caramel[12]. When she finally allowed herself to knock, her hoof thumped limply against the wood like it was disarmed by its own disinterest. Twilight was perplexed by her anatomy’s peculiar tendency to exert independent influence even beyond the level of her active consciousness.
The door opened. It was Caramel. He looked out at Twilight, smiling nervously[13]. He opened the door wider and gestured with his right foreleg to the interior of his small home. “Hi,” he said. “Uh. Come on in.”
Twilight stepped over the threshold of the doorway, consciously aware that she was rapidly approaching the point of a quantum variable collapsing from its superposition into the wave or particle that would signal doom or hope in the near and immediate future. Redundancy seemed to be a flaw of meticulous thought. Some flaws seemed inseparable from their sources.
Inside Caramel’s house, the décor matched the unpleasant paint job, and Twilight wondered whether this was a conscious decision on Caramel’s part (both interior and exterior) or merely a butterfly-wing-through-millenia type of coincidence. She couldn’t decide which would be more horrible. Awkwardly[14], Caramel showed her the kitchen (bland, but with a nice coffee maker, which Caramel pointed out, including its multiple temperature settings and delicate bean handling mechanisms), the hallway to the bathroom (obligatorily awkward; Twilight’s current need to relieve herself was at an upsettingly high 23%, even though she had taken precautions against this before leaving by sitting on the toilet for thirty minutes and urinating every time her body felt able—she hoped the date would be less than the usual two to three hours it took for her bladder to require emptying. She avowed not to drink too much coffee), and the living room, which included a cheap-looking but comfortable orange couch, a coffee table (which itself held two soda cans, three rings of soda-can-shaped condensation in addition to the aforementioned cans, a TV remote (stained with a mysterious brown (possibly chocolate?) substance on one fifth of its total surface, starting from the top right and moving towards the center in a blade like pattern, complete with traces of spattering, as though something had been hurled or flung against it while liquid and had hardened afterwards (assuming nopony had bothered to clean it up, which they hadn’t)), an ashtray, and what appeared to be a small piece of marijuana paraphernalia, which Twilight spotted only for just a moment before Caramel hurriedly[15] tucked it away. “Sorry,” he said. His cheeks reddened slightly.
“Oh,” Twilight said. The intimidating volume of potential further responses threatened to overwhelm her. “It’s okay,” she said. This was always a safe bet.
“Do you take cream or sugar in your coffee?” Caramel asked as he made his way to the kitchen. Twilight could hear the sound of cupboards being opened and bags of coffee beans being opened[16].
“Um, yes please.”
A moment of time[17] passed during which the sound of Caramel’s coffee preparation was the only sound, relative to the conversation that had occurred previously.
“Um,” Caramel said.
Twilight noted her bladder was at 25%, despite having consumed no coffee thus far. This was troubling.
“How much?”
“Hmm?”[18]
“Uh. How much, uh, cream and sugar? Do you want?”
“Oh. Um…” Twilight’s brain forestalled her answer despite its existence in the marrow of her consciousness, a ritual she performed every morning like a part of breathing. Two and a half sugar. Just a dollop of cream. Honey if she wanted to pretend to remember the sensation of taste.
“Sorry?”
“What?”
“Oh. I thought you said… sorry, did you say how much?”
“Oh, no. Sorry. I, uh. Three—two. I mean, two and a half. Sugars, please.”
“Two?”
“No… two and a half. Is that okay?”
“Two and a half?”
“If it’s too much trouble, two is fine.”
“No, I can do two and a half.”
Twilight sighed as the sound of coffee preparation resumed.
She had forgotten to mention cream. This now seemed impossible. Twilight stared at the coffee table as Caramel worked in the kitchen. She noticed the tiny flecks of green-and-orange-ish plant matter that clung to the table disguised as dust particles or cat hair. Twilight had tried smoking marijuana once, after four days of research and such an aversion to the social act of acquiring the substance that she had thrown up two and a half times that day; once in the morning, once right before the meeting to acquire the marijuana, and a little bit during the meeting itself, which she swallowed while being handed the bag of ‘bud’. The bag had cost her five bits, and was smaller than she had expected, though also too big. After hours of agonizing, Twilight had ground and smoked her first ever marijuana cigarette[19]. The ensuing panic attack had lasted three hours, eleven minutes, nine seconds, and Twilight had thrown the rest of the marijuana, in its flimsy plastic bag, in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, and had not touched it since. Since all of her research indicated that panic attacks were a potential side-effect of smoking marijuana, this outcome hadn’t been entirely unexpected, but she was nevertheless disappointed. She held out vague hope that she had been doing something wrong. Maybe Caramel could show her. Maybe there was a way to dull the thing in her brain that made her fear the act of being—and equally the act of nonbeing, the perpetual oscillation of life and rejection of life. Twilight wished she had asked for cream.
With a surprising amount of grace (and what Twilight attempted to convince herself was a resultantly compelling sexual attraction (but which was not)), Caramel brought the two cups of steaming coffee into the living room and set them on the table, coasterless. The mug he positioned in front of Twilight was lime green, with a sort of crafted vine encasing the mug in various positions, with a mostly realistic shading throughout the structure of the vine. Twilight noted her enjoyment of the mug’s appearance. She wondered if it was the happiest she had been in months. Years seemed more likely. This was a simultaneous sign of hope and pointlessness. Caramel’s mug was a plain, ugly, brownish yellow.
“It’s a roast from Saddle Arabia. Very rich flavour and aroma.”
The fact that Caramel seemed confident when in the articulation of knowledge made Twilight very attracted to him. It was surprising to her that she could experience attraction directly, though this might just be a manifestation of the same principle that allowed her to laugh with her friends during the day and then soak her pillow with tears the same night. Caramel’s body type was far from ‘stud-like’, or even ‘athletic’, but this made Twilight like him more. She wondered if everypony was possessed of a unique and secret allure, a sort of sonder of attraction. This thought gave her further hope. Things seemed to be going well so far. Twilight took a sip of her coffee.
The absence of cream was noticeable. It ruined the cup, as the intense, spiced-earth flavour of the grind itself overwhelmed, and the sugar (Twilight was sure it was three, not two and a half) only combined with the dark, gritty taste to form a sickening blend of saccharine mud. Twilight barely subdued the urge to vomit. Everything was ruined. Hope died its usual infinity of deaths, cut open on the precipice of belief by the jagged edge of the real world every time. The blood, though metaphorical, metaphysical, meta-real, even, was tangible, and Twilight felt it soak over and through her like a cold sweat, a carnation mist of failure that the mug of Saddle Arabian roast in her hooves represented. Twilight took a second sip and set the cup down on the coffee table (coasterless).
“Good, isn’t it?” Caramel asked, smiling. The steam from his mug distorted the shape of his face for an instant, and the sudden shifting of light and perspective made Twilight realize how feminine his features were; how unattracted to him she was. How Fluttershy’s soft wings would feel like a cloud as she drifted to unconsciousness inside them, perhaps finally to a sleep that resembled the soft sunlight.
“Mhm.”
Rough, prodding conversation ensued as the date progressed. With every mouthful of coffee Twilight downed, she felt more defeated. Her attempt to escape the treachery of her loneliness had failed, and her sorrows had redoubled, and redoubled with every moment she remained, sinking further and further away from anypony who could understand her or be something she wanted. Bladder at 36%.
Caramel set his mug down for its final rest before Twilight had reached the half-way point of her cup. She didn’t think she would drink any further.
“So… um. Thanks for, uh, coming over. For coffee, I mean.”
“Oh.” Twilight couldn’t project the angle of Caramel’s conversational trajectory, and it worried her on a level she didn’t feel comfortable articulating. Who was this other consciousness, and what were his motives? “Um, of course. I was happy to.”
“I mean, you’re really… you’re like, Twilight Sparkle, so I didn’t think you’d want to, um, even give me the time of day…”
There was this element to it? It seemed so alien; so foreign, that Twilight was anything more than a meandering want, a need to belong and feel wanted that was never filled. She couldn’t think of herself as a hero, as a bolsterer, as an accomplishment. All the things she had done and been before the vice of her mental chemistry had distorted her into her present state of mind seemed like another pony entirely—one so far away she could no longer even imagine connecting with them. Like an entirely different species, looking at the habitation of herself through a world she didn’t understand anymore.
“Oh… no. It’s fine, really. I, uh…” That was all Twilight could think of to say. She wanted the date to be over. 41%.
Conversation proceeded in a similar fashion that Twilight couldn’t bother to retain interest in. All of her desire was focused on leaving, so that she could re-enter the familiar world of her house and her bed and her blankets and her cold wrap of unconsciousness, where sometimes it didn’t hurt simply to be.
It was impossible not to notice the physical displacement of weight on the couch as Caramel moved, shifting towards Twilight with his full complement of two adverbs[20]. There was the proximity. There was the desire for touch that Twilight could feel being thrust at her like a sharp weapon.
That was supposed to be it though, wasn’t it? Twilight vaguely remembered a discussion with herself, a philosophical loop ad nauseum where she’d convinced herself physical unity was the same as emotional unity, and that if she could simply want, or be wanted, even in this wholly unsatisfying capacity (for she knew it would be, just as her brother had accidentally taught her when she was young, and why she secretly feared she could never love anyone other than him, and only through accident had she kept herself alive the night of his wedding, but that was another matter entirely), that would be enough to keep going. Twilight felt Caramel’s hoof on her shoulder. The urge to vomit remained, though not as a direct reaction to Caramel’s touch; it was simply a feeling Twilight was unable to escape, like so many of her other emotions.
At this juncture, Twilight made a face she knew was on parallel with her ‘Hmm?’, and the effect was immediate. Caramel leaned further towards her, his hoof moved from her shoulder to the middle of her back, rubbing up and down in triple-adverbial fashion, while Caramel’s face, in obvious anticipation of the physical activity it envisioned to be connected with Twilight’s look, became a parody of affection, a death-masque of what a kissing face must look like, and Twilight realized she could never love anyone or anything, but leaned in for a kiss anyway, because this revelation was nothing new and often went away after enough time.
The kiss was sloppy, but not as unpleasant as the coffee had been. Caramel’s tongue was moist, and he used it a lot. Twilight kissed back demurely, partly out of fear, and partly because this was a ‘Hmm’ as well, and she wanted to see, just see, if her theory was correct. Because she needed something.
But as the condensation of actions passed (all on Caramel’s sour orange couch[21]), Twilight realized that because her own manifestation of need was so far away that there really was a barrier between her and everypony else, and that Caramel was just the resolute representation of this separation in the most concrete terms the universe could give her; that this incompatibility of desire, this inability to intuit want, to even want the thing she told herself she wanted, meant there really was truly nothing left.
Caramel was as gentle as Twilight expected him to be. To escape the coffee-like reality of the situation, Twilight composed a script of the entire event in her head[22]. Eventually, it was finished.
“Sorry,” Caramel said, gesturing to Twilight's fur.
“It’s okay,” Twilight said.
After Twilight excused herself to the bathroom to clean up (and relieve her bladder, which felt 84% full, and was therefore somewhat uncomfortable to empty), she returned to the living room to find Caramel smoking a small bowl of marijuana out of the previously hidden item of paraphernalia. The piece was simple but elegantly complex—Twilight marvelled at the simple principles of its water-cooling and surface area smoke dispersion as Caramel combusted the crude plant matter in the piece’s glass-bowl and inhaled the smoke. He held it in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling openly into the interior of his house. The smoke lingered in the air, caught in the disappearing sunlight and the motes of dust that plagued the existence of every interior.
“Sorry,” Caramel said, his voice tempered with noticeable shame, but at the same time unapologetic.
“It’s okay,” Twilight said again.
Caramel offered her a hit of marijuana, which she turned down. The two talked for thirteen more minutes, during which Caramel seemed noticeably more relaxed, but even less engaging than he had been previously, the dulling effects of THC, CBD, and other chemicals in his system dampening the hot edge of passion that had caused Twilight to feel even a spark(le) of attraction for him for even an instant. After it became apparent to both parties that the date was over, Twilight politely thanked Caramel for inviting her, who politely thanked her back for coming. Twilight left, walked home, and went upstairs to her bedroom. She lay down in her bed and wrapped the blankets around herself, their familiar star patterns and blue thread both a comforting sameness and a reminder of the inescapable paradox of the capacity to feel and think and yearn for somepony else to do those things with.
Before the moon could rise fully from its Canterlot throne into the night of stars, Twilight uncurled herself from her blankets and reached over to her bedside table. She withdrew the bag of marijuana that was still inside the bottom drawer and placed it softly on her bed. Over the next few minutes, she carefully ground the marijuana, packed it into the small glass piece she had acquired after her purchase of the marijuana, in the hopes that it might incline her further to attempt smoking again (which it hadn’t), conjured a small flame with a flash of her horn, lit the bowl of the piece, and inhaled the smoke. She was tempted to describe it as acrid, but sensed somehow in the pantheon of descriptors about an incredibly ancient plant that this may have been done already. She settled for ‘the smell of smoldering cognisance’, and collapsed backwards once she finished the bowl. Within a few minutes, she was asleep. Dreamless.