Last night I watched Twilight cry over my dead father while I sat there and comforted her. She wasn’t wailing, but sniffling and tearing up, and I watched with curiosity more than anything else. I want to believe that she’s just a more emotional pony than I, but I can’t say that for certain. I was once as she was, emotional and attached. I even remember a time where I had, in my youth, let my imagination get the better of me and considered this exact scenario: a dead father. I cried myself to sleep that night. Now that I’m older I think that a sense of respect has overtaken my attachment to things.

I view myself as older and more mature in all the realistic ways of life. Long-married couples do not love each other as they once did. Passion is a youthful thing and I’ve had my run of that. Ponies have always told me that I was “emotionally smart,” older in heart than other ponies my age, and I now know they are right. Passion leads to so much folly that one is better off without it. It would be so regrettable, but the nifty thing about the progression is that I can’t find it regrettable. I’m too old to do so.

At one point in time, Twilight asked me if I had a bad relationship with my father. I told her that there were no outstanding complaints. She looked at me hard and then asked if there was anything else I wanted to talk about. I thought, and asked her why she had a bag of coffee with my name on it.

She blushed and said, “Rarity, please, this isn’t the time for that.”

I nodded and we sat in silence. Twilight started to fidget and throw glances between me and her hooves. All at once, she said it was because she harboured feelings for me and was then silent. I asked her for how long, and she said since about a month after she met me, and had been afraid of compromising our friendship over such a matter. She admitted that she should have just told me, and not grown obsessive about it.

I nodded again and felt my stomach churn. I noticed that I was now on my third cup of coffee, and almost as if given a cue, my hooves began to shake. I felt light-headed, but faster. There was an apology for being two-faced that I forgave. Twilight then told me that the conversation could be postponed until I was ready to answer and I replied that it was no trouble. Today was a day as any other was. What discerns one day from another is what happened on it, but there was apparently some rule that said only so much could happen on a single day. All things are held equal in my eyes, and I think that’s why I can judge things so objectively. A day where both my father dies and I start a new relationship is no different than a day where I design a new dress and cook dinner for Sweetie Belle. It seems heartless to equate my father dying to designing a new dress, but in only so many words can I describe how they feel the same.

Twilight fidgeted again. It would make her happy to have me, so I let her. Next Chapter: note seven of twenty-nine Estimated time remaining: 12 Minutes