Derpy Hooves was a grey pegasus who lived in Cloudsdale. She delivered the mail for other ponies who weren’t as good at flying as she was, and made sure that all the envelopes and parcels got to their right place, except when they didn’t and that was called an ‘accident’ and Derpy was trying her hardest to have less of those lately but it didn’t seem to be working.

The first accident Derpy could remember was herself.

That was because Derpy’s mother and father hadn’t wanted a filly or foal of their own—they didn’t seem to want anything. So they had given Derpy up for adoption before she was even old enough to remember their faces, and now only the imprints of ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ remained scratched on the stain-glass of her subconscious.

Glass that was foggy lately. Derpy had taken up and quit smoking that strange plant from Saddle Arabia, that the pony with the head-shawl had said would magic away all of the fog inside her and bring it into the world.

It was 5:34AM, and Derpy felt very foggy.

The fog was something that was always there, which was silly because it wasn’t always there in the real world. Sometimes you needed fog for a day that was foggy—a day where you didn’t know what to expect. And Cloudsdale and the weather team were responsible for all of the weather in Ponyville. That was too big a job, in Derpy’s opinion—she liked letters. Letters were easy—you wrote on them where you wanted them to go and to who, and then just delivered them. Finding where exactly that might be was the tricky part, but Derpy was always practicing, always trying to get better.

In the mornings when Derpy brushed her teeth she felt sad. She imagined that the sadness was a combination of a lot of different feelings mixed up into one, like how at the bar you could order a Sunfire Circle cocktail and it would have only one flavour which was Sunfire Circle cocktail, except that flavour was made up of ten different flavours that had all been mixed together, and then coated the rim in sugar and lit it on fire? Derpy wasn’t sure. She didn’t drink much.

The last time she’d gone to a bar, it was with Cloudchaser—Derpy was always trying to make friends, even if she wasn’t sure what a friend was. Was a friend somepony that you could count on whenever, no matter what? Derpy didn’t have any of those. She had Cloudchaser, who liked to hang out with her once a week after work at the local bar (Light-Air Libations), tho the two of them never really talked about much. Not much more than work, anyway. And work was just a means to… to what?

Derpy had asked this question the last time she’d spent time with Cloudchaser, and the conversation had gotten very icky very quickly. Cloudchaser had shut up, like Derpy had said something awful. In her head, Derpy could hear Cloudchaser’s musical-but-often-slightly-nasally voice: “What do you mean, ‘a means to’…? Work is… work! You just do it. Because it’s work!”

And for that reason, Derpy swallowed the question that had bubbled up in her subconscious, and doing so made her tummy ache, so she went to the bathroom for seven minutes and held very hard onto the metal rails on either side so she could feel like she wasn’t about to float away. Derpy had a lifelong fear—a phobia, really—that all of a sudden, for no reason at all, gravity would suddenly cease to exist. Everypony and everything that was on the planet would go flying into space, and die as they crossed the barriers of the horizon, and all the accomplishments and lives and stories of everyone would be scattered ashes on a canvas of stardust and impossible empty blackness.

It was this fear that made it hard for her to go outside sometimes—to go to work—to talk to other ponies—to do anything, really. She could feel it, in her stomach, and she had never asked anypony else if they had this feeling except for her friend Carrot Top who had said no and they weren’t friends anymore anyway. Derpy remembered a lot of dirty dishes and boys over at odd hours. She scratched her head with her right hoof.

Derpy was afraid of almost everything, but by making situations familiar, she could learn to get thru them. Getting out of bed was scary, but it wasn’t scary if she had done it before and knew exactly what to do. All she had to do was swing her legs over the bed, and there would be her slippers waiting for—

No slippers. The slippers were somewhere else.

Derpy started to cry.

This happened a lot—the slippers, the crying, the everything of Derpy’s life. Because where were the slippers? Where were the socks? She was sure she’d put them down beside her bed when she went to lay down for the night, one grey one with clouds on it and another blue and dark blue striped one with little pink hearts dancing around. She liked those socks because they made her feel lucky. She could feel lucky whenever she wanted, as long as she had one of her good luck charms (horseglove, twelve-leaf clover, 1 piece Equestria silver, over 103 years old.

Derpy didn’t take the good luck charms out often—she liked to look at them, where she kept them, in a little wooden box with painted stars and red ribbons that was under her bed. She got it out now and looked at the memories she had kept.

These were the only memories that meant anything—that everything else would slip away, and you could write in your journal “Today I talked with Twilight Sparkle,” and maybe if it was Twilight Sparkle you could say “do you remember that conversation we had on Tuesday?”, and Twilight Sparkle’s head was so full of books and information that when you said ‘Tuesday’ her brain heard ‘Two’s-day’ and she immediately tried to think of every metaphysical ramification that might imply. The two of them? Together? Dating? Did Derpy want to date her? Oh, but Twilight was so sure she wasn’t interested in, um, mares…

This was only one example of how a memory could trick you. Many times, when Derpy was sure she had remembered something perfectly, she would check her calendar or the almanac she had gotten from the library to see if she was right. And if neither of those things confirmed her memory she usually forgot about it. She had lost a lot of years this way—specifically the ones farthest away, where the light of her soul only crept into the shaded corners, and there was nothing there but the darkness anyway.

What was darkness?

Derpy shut her eyes.

Darkness was the fear that you might never be able to open your eyes again. Because what if this was all a dream—and the muscles you feel in your legs and hooves and body and brain are all delusions, signals sent to you by a larger processing unit stored inside the giant chunk of meat that is a pony body. And Derpy could fly so that meant some extra musculature and arrangement, but really, everypony was the same; they all had brains inside them that made them want to do things. Hearts, too. Derpy’s heart hurt a lot—not because she ate spicy food (tho she did, because she liked it—curry and jerked Devil’s Club), but because she felt like most of the time she was the only pony in the whole universe that understood what the word ‘lonely’ meant.

This was not a claim Derpy liked making, even in her own head. She was Derpy Hooves, but other ponies called her just Derpy, and that was either a nickname or it was them making fun of her, and sometimes it was both. Derpy didn’t feel like it as okay to make fun of other ponies, but everypony else did it, so she tried not to let it bother her. She tried not to let other ponies bother her in general, but they always did—they always had stories to tell her, that were long and complicated and got too big for her brain to keep inside, and then she would feel muddled and fuzzy all day, and there was nothing she could do to get rid of it.

She got rid of it by diving.

When Derpy dived, her entire body became motion—the pinpoint of atom that nudges the barriers between potential speeds and realms of existence. Derpy wondered about barriers. A barrier is a door. But a barrier is also a door that doesn’t exist. So a barrier is a fake door? A mind door? Hmm. Derpy spun left to swirl into a collection of cirrus clouds, spritzing herself with the condensed moisture and spinning in circles until the sky and the ground became the same thing.

And that was what was real, anyway—being able to tell neither heads from tails. And that was Derpy, and she was pretty sure about that.

After a few more minutes of frolicking in the clouds, Derpy made her way back home. On the way home she saw a pegasus with a blue coat wearing a white baseball cap that said “Go Parasprites!” Derpy didn’t understand why anyone would want to support parasprites—they were an awful nasty bug that came and at everything it could, without any regard for anyone else’s personal property or respect. Derpy didn’t really have much personal property—she’d gotten her bed from a friend, and slept on it on the ground with her one blanket and a picture of the ocean on her bedside table. The picture of the ocean was of the sea, and the cliffs, sodium-chloride spray etching at the rocks, and Derpy staring far out into the distance on the tip of the cliff on the photo’s left, wondering if the sun might come catch her if she waited for it long enough.

Derpy put the memory box back under her bed and lay down. She’d done enough remember for today.

Click. Derpy counted 43 minutes before she fell asleep, and she knew because she made each second a cloud and there were 43 clouds and then

When Derpy woke up, she felt different. ‘Different’ was a feeling that made no sense, because it didn’t feel ‘same’. But ‘same’ always felt different—was there such a thing as ‘same’, Derpy asked herself as she got out of bed and made her way to the shower.

Derpy liked to shower to make herself clean. She knew that most ponies liked to do it once a day, but Derpy had always thought to herself, What’s the point in cleaning yourself if you’re just going to get dirty again? Luckily, Derpy’s postal manager had explained this point very well—you cleaned yourself to be clean. And that made sense to Derpy, and even if she didn’t mind being dirty by herself, she wanted to be clean for other ponies, so she showered every morning now after that conversation.

And today was Wednesday. Wednesday meant the day that came before Thursday, which was usually lightning storm day. Wednesday was the middle day of the week, so it made Derpy happy and sad at the same time.

Where was Thursday? Did it exist? Derpy checked her calendar just to make sure. Except…

“Oh, no, come on, where is it…”

Derpy had finally begun to ramble, which is what she did when her brain couldn’t keep her thots inside her head anymore. Right now, she was rambling because the calendar she had bought and hung on the wall next to her bed was gone, and that meant either that somepony had snuck in at night and stolen it from her, or that it had disappeared without her knowledge, possibly due to latent magical energies or some other worldly force not yet to be understood.

Not being able to find her calendar made Derpy sadder. Already, she was starting to forget what her plans were supposed to be for the week. Make plans, she told herself. A failure to plan is a plan to do really badly. Derpy scanned her apartment three times before finding her calendar (with pictures of cute bunnies and other baby animals on it) fallen behind the bed, grabbing it, and sticking it back up to the wall again.

May 3rd… did that mean anything? Three. There were three types of ponies. Three. Third time was the charm. May 3rd? So there might be a third somepony what? Derpy scratched her head. Calendars were confusing if you listened to them too long. Instead, Derpy took a red marker between her teeth and drew a red ‘X’ on Wednesday.

Have. Fun. it said.

Derpy scrunched her face.

Why was having fun so hard?

Everypony else on the planet seemed to be able to do it—and certainly most of them had it either better or worse than her in some degree. She was Derpy Hooves—the pony the entire town allowed to get away with anything, because she was ‘special’.

Derpy sighed.

She hated being ‘special’.

That was why Derpy didn’t come to town anymore—she had no friendly faces in a village where everyone laughed at her.

But what was a laugh?

Derpy lied down on her bed and closed her eyes, which she liked to do when some serious thinking was required. Right now she thot about laughing—the sound she made that came out of her when somepony told a good joke.

What was a good joke?

A joke that made her laugh.

And then Derpy realized.

She hadn’t laughed in two years.

As she lay on her bed, eyes closed, ears tickled only faintly by the ambient wind-dance of Cloudsdale itself, Derpy realized she hadn’t laughed in two years. She had gone thru two years of her life without smiling—without grinning—without chuckling—without letting go a single bit of emotion that would make her feel kind or good or free.

Derpy tried.

The laugh came out as a sob.

And this was something that happened often too—sobbing, because there was nothing else to do. Because would that pegasus there come inside and help Derpy figure out why she was alone all the time? Would her friend Cloudchaser come back after drinks and hold her and tell her everything would be alright? Would the ocean suddenly swallow the entire continent, burying every living thing and city in an aquamarine grave?

Derpy had bad dreams sometimes. Sometimes she felt like her whole life was a bad dream.

This was a bad problem to have, because it gave Derpy the unfortunate effect of never knowing whether she was dreaming or awake. Sure—she felt awake, but a ‘feeling’ was just a series of chemicals in your brain that made you do things. Twilight Sparkle had told her that, and then Derpy had taken out five books on biology and quantum physics and electron valence pairings and read them all in five nights and when she put them back she understood quantum physics. Except that wasn’t very useful for being a mail-mare.

A mail-mare was somepony (why always ‘mare’, Derpy wondered?) who delivered important letters to other ponies. Derpy liked her job because it made her feel important—even if she was the worst member on staff, she could still do a great job and make someone happy just by trying her hardest.

But what was her hardest.

Derpy looked around her bedroom.

Outside the open window, Dusk began to settle in the clouds, the violets and cyan blending like blood and wine.

Derpy looked at her wall, which was bare, except a single picture of herself and Carrot top in a photo booth, hugging and making funny faces.

Derpy sighed.

Her bedspread was black, with little silver diamonds on each segment. She had two grey pillows, which were usually heavy with her sweat, whether she had just woken or only been lying down for a moment.

What was love, Derpy asked herself, and sighed, rolling back onto the bed.

Do you really want to know? a voice in her head asked back.

Derpy shut her eyes very tightly and bit her tongue and yelled into her pillow for six minutes straight. And then she punched a wall, and it hurt.

Derpy did this because the voice that had been in her head, asking that question, was that one that had been there for sixth months—and, more accurately, her whole life. Derpy had always been lonely, so an imaginary friend seemed a sensible solution. The problem was that the imaginary friend hadn’t gone away as they were supposed to—whether this was because Derpy wasn’t ready for real friends, or because she simply had an overactive imagination, she wasn’t sure.

The voice in her head didn’t have a name all the time. It had sounded like Discord at first, which had been scary enough for two weeks of silence before another conversation. To talk to the voice in her head, all Derpy Hooves had to do was sit down on her bed and listen. And the voice came to her, even if it was just hers.

Derpy, it said. Are you doing okay?

“Yeah,” Derpy said. Sighed. “I’m fine.”

What’s ‘fine’?

Derpy scratched her head.

Insofar as she understand what was going on (which wasn’t very well), she was maybe talking to her subconscious? Which was in the habit of asking very tricky questions that were hard to give good answers to.

“Um… happy?”

The voice nodded inside Derpy’s head.

And are you happy?

“Um… no. Not really.” Derpy felt a well of something bubble up in her chest, like a balloon tipped with a thousand hot-needles, or some caustic solution meant to clean drains.

The voice paused.

For effect.

Would you like to be?

And Derpy thot.

She thot about what being happy might mean.

Because for her whole life she had been sad. For her whole life, other ponies had given her what to think and feel, and her mom and dad were gone so she didn’t even have them to go talk to when everypony else in the world did. She barely had friends, and the one’s she did have were afraid of her—afraid because if they sat around for more than five minutes Derpy would ask questions like “Are you guys ever so lonely you can’t walk?”, or “Do you think taking enough of these herbal sedatives would kill me?” Derpy lived her life as a constant dare, and her friends were in no such shape to play keep-up.

And now, Derpy’s speed had gotten her in her room with a fuzzy voice in her head. And the voice was nice and the voice was mean. It told her jokes. It tried to hug her, even tho it couldn’t. It made her brand herself with a piece of red-hot Equestrian Nickel to try to overcome the hold of her job on her very soul—so far it just hurt a lot. But Derpy didn’t understand ‘metaphysics’, even tho the voice in her head said otherwise. Derpy didn’t even know what a ‘metaphysic’ was. Mostly she liked muffins, and lately even those didn’t do the trick.

Where was Dinky, Derpy would ask herself. Where’s my sweet little girl?

And the answer was behind a cage and some tape somewhere.

“When you’re fit as a parent, we’ll discuss returning your child to you,” the pony in the black suit with the black sunglasses had said, so Derpy called him Mr. Black even tho he might not have been called that. The other pony was a Pegasus, bright-white, with little half-moon spectacles and a crescent moon cutie mark. Mr. White, Derpy called him, until she learned his name was Crescent Wing. The other pony didn’t give his name. He did his speech and took away Dinky, and that was loneliness, and that was Derpy.

And what was a Derpy?

Derpy, to herself (and she didn’t know about anypony else) was a derp. A ‘failure’, if she wanted to use that word, which she didn’t, because ponies used it towards her all the time. She wasn’t just a slow pony, she wasn’t just silly or dumb or lame or stupid—she was a ‘failure’, at being a proper pony. Derpy’s heart squeezed, and tears came out of both her eyes, like pressure on a stress-ball.

The question always came back to what now?

What now when you have tried everything and nothing has worked?

Derpy sighed. The night-sky was still open and bleeding, the colors of the handiwork of the evening weather crew coating the entirety of Equestrian soil in love and beauty.

Hmm.

Derpy stood up from her bed. The picture on her bedside table caught her eye, but she pressed it flat w/ a hoof, the picture vanished.

And she went to the window.

And stared outside.

The drop, really, was nothing—relative velocities, speed control, muscle memory, etc. etc.

But why did she want to jump?

Why, as she asked that question, did her hooves leave the safety of the window-sill ledge?

For the same reason, friends, that Derpy’s wings stopped moving. And they froze and sent her plummeting towards earth like a torpedo on target for perfect delivery.

This wasn’t happening. Derpy could fly, yes? She had wings, was a pegasus? Derpy tried an experimental flap of her wings. They remained glued to her side, two useless appendages bound to a cadaver.

Oh. No. This was very bad. Maximum velocity on impact = squish squish, Derpy remembered from high school math. And she didn’t want to go squish. So she needed her wings, but she couldn’t get them.

The ground was coming up too fast—Derpy could estimate the distance based on her trajectory and constant rate of velocity (having hit terminal halfway thru the fall). Impact would come in around five seconds. Bones would break. Skin would tear apart. Organs might do some found bouncing, like an exploded beanbag chair, when the bits flew in every direction.

Before ‘two’, Derpy felt air, feathers, gravity. She held them for a second and they were gone, swooped away with her.

“You gotta be careful, Ditzy Doo,” Rainbow Dash said, cradling the pegasus in her arms as best she could while manoeuvring accurately. “Test your nerves on the small jumps first, then move on to the big ones.”

 I was trying to kill myself. I wish you hadn’t caught me. I wish I was in a hole in the ground right now.

“Oh… yeah. Thanks.” Derpy scratched the back of her head w/ her right foreleg hoof. Rainbow Dash smiled at her, seemingly undistracted by anything.

“Do you want some tips for starting out? Not to brag, but I’m pretty good at this whole flying thing, y’know.” Rainbow Dash stuck out her tongue, and to Derpy’s surprise, a tiny tickle of warmth grew in her heart.

“Um… maybe?” Derpy was never sure what to say to requests. Because so often a pony would trick you—trick you into thinking something that wasn’t true, that was only true to them, or to trick you into doing something for them without caring about the other ponies feelings, which Derpy had learned was ‘manipulation’ and she didn’t do it anymore.

“We could get together tomorrow and do some drills if you want. I just didn’t know you were into hardcore flying like I am.”

“Oh,” Derpy started, “I’m actually—“

“I’ve gotta jet, actually—thunderstorms planning for Thursday and I need to help corral the clouds. You be careful, okay?”

Derpy looked at Rainbow Dash’s face. Into her eyes, which stared right back, unwavering. The eyes that were blue, like the sky.

Derpy nodded. “Okay,” she said.

Without time for sound or speed to catch up, Rainbow Dash lifted from the ground and left, a memory in the æther that might be only in Derpy’s heart and head.

“Okay,” Derpy said. She looked up at the sky, which was a tapestry of chroma and equilibrium, and her at the bottom of the ground, a grey pegasus with nothing to do but blow bubbles for the ones she loves.

“Okay,” Derpy said again.

“Okay.”

And the fourth time, maybe it was true.