The water pooled warmly around her feet but she could hardly notice as the whole world spun dizzyingly, turning into blue glass walls. It tasted like the airport, so Sunset knew it was the airport—and the thrum of busy-busy filled the air like a flick had been switched. Somehow it was like she had never left, and she nestled into her space in the shower stream and felt warm even as the cold nipped at her bones. And the girls (the girls!) were around her, sort of at least.

“I’ve been kind of wondering... well, kind of thinking about what you know I’ve always been thinking about, taking time to, well, and I guess it’s not really the sort of thing you wouldn’t really know, but then again...”

Twilight’s sparkling-grape voice was always soothing, spidering out with a wingspan wide enough to clasp around her arms and hold her securely, even as her skin crawled. Her shuddering silhouette seemed less friendly but sometimes them’s just the breaks.

“...but it takes one to know one, you know, and I guess I think that maybe, possibly, it could be the case that... well, I’m just thinking out loud, you know, but—and not to get overly into the specifics about this sort of thing—I guess I just... well...”

Somewhere unseen, Rainbow Dash laughed in some marbled synecdoche, and Twilight stopped and got all bashful like she does. Red cheeks bloodied her vision, and the water covered her feet completely by now. Sunset blinked as the airport blinked, and somewhere in the back of her head there were sensations like needlepokes all over, trying to lull her down, but she wasn’t having any of it. Applejack spoke next, in honeyed candor.

“Well, sugarcube, if you’re so focused on tryin’a do this sorta thing, I guess all I can say is that before ya look before ya leap, might as well spend a few minutes on, uh, I dunno, plannin’ out the whole thing ’n’ whatnot, just so ya got it all there...”

It was all just noise, it’s all white noise, apophenia reaching out to tangle garden paths together out of nothing. Words choke and die in her throat. She could feel blustery blue rattling around in her stomach, even long since dissolved—an ugly construct of her ugly, stupid head. Icky, sticky, she moves her hands and brushes Twilight and the rest away and the airport leaves; it doesn’t fragment, it still exists somewhere out there, but it’s gone away, she’s made it go away. Sunset Shimmer is alone just how she should be, and the water is up to her ankles because the fucking drain won’t drain—it’s called a drain, it has one job—and her brain is on strings pulling her downward like a marionette that still can fight, but for how long? The air still tastes like the airport but she can’t think about that now so she wipes away the lather and also tries not to think too much about splotches of paint and elsewise that dot the shower wall as she presses the water off and the thick cold goosebumps her flesh.

The towel is little, bitter comfort, but it’s all she has.

Of course, it’s super funny-cutesy when all you can feel is states you’ve never been to below you, and you accidentally tell someone online that you thought they were God when they showed up on the chatroom one day, and the songs sound muted and drained of colour, and when walking around it’s all stumbledy-jumbledy. Not a weight holding you down but everything’s a little more two-dimensional than usual as you try to slip the hall and it feels like a train leaving the station and it’s more like you’re phasing from place to place, now that was funny, even funny ha-ha. And it’s still funny sometimes but also it’s never enough—maybe once you go out so far into the waters, everything behind seems just like a blur with a smudge brush, or something like that. And that’s why you fucked around and found something else, didn’t you, except this way you’re really melting your head for sure, taking scissors to your wings, not even poetic like ichor—you’re just losing it.

If you make too much noise, the neighbours will hear, and they’ll find out you’re all alone, and they’ll call someone. Celestia’s spell is strong, but not that strong; it can break, and if it does it will be all your fault and you’ll be detained and they’ll ask questions and the whole thing will go to shit. Maybe you can escape and go be a horse again but you don’t want to be a horse anymore, and why would you, anyway? And how could you face her? What would you say? What would she say?

Sunset Shimmer sat with knees-locked-to-chest against the wall, on the carpeted floor. It was dark, probably outside too but definitely inside with the curtains closed with their corners taped to the walls, and dark means spiders. Not real spiders—at least not usually, though sometimes those appear too but usually she could tell them apart—but the dark distant forms quivering with no legs and all legs at once, twitching around but never able to find purchase in her sallow skin. Never the same size, never the same shape, and she knew they weren’t real, she always knew they weren’t real, but they felt like some strange trace of another world, though she could ignore them if she tried so she did and they faded into the background.

But Sunset still shivered like she always did, locked there immobile in unmatched sock and pajam. It’d be nice to say her brain moved slow like through molasses but it didn’t; it moved quick, like it always did, but some pathways were just out of reach and she was slipping and sliding on the ice forward quickly because the Zamboni followed close behind, wiping everything over again and then it was gone. Sometimes it’d leave a sliver of something she could snatch up with a closer look, but even then it was frozen and slippery and might just fall back out of reach again. Headphones pressed against her ears like they usually did and the bass notes thrummed from a black hole inside her chest, even as the song was in the wrong key and just got deeper and deeper, slower and slower, all the while at the same pitch and speed. Something noxious and hypnotic rippled through her veins, pulling her downward.

“Sunset?” she heard a familiar voice call from the front of the room. Blinking and rubbing her eyes, she looked up past the rows of desks with students’ eyeballs putting her under the microscope, and up to Miss Cheerilee. She suddenly felt very, very small, an insect in amber. “Do you have any thoughts, maybe?”

“I...” She gulped, and her throat was completely dry; the sick lull pulled at her cheeks. “Yeah. The green light... it represents the future Gatsby wishes he could have. But for him, it’s always just out of reach.”

Cheerilee beamed, though all Sunset could see was the faint lines of age teasing at the teacher’s skin, and something about her eyes seemed hollow and gone, like the window to the soul got shut. “Exactly, Sunset, thank you. As you can see...” she droned on, but Sunset’s eyes drifted from the teacher’s face and up the screech-blackboard to the corners of the room where even in the light the false spiders started to twitch out and around, blossoming out of dusty cobwebs, not the other way ’round like they’re supposed to.

Class passed and most of it Sunset’s eyes were on the clock, watching the hands tick on faster toward freedom, to the lunch hour. She was supposed to see the girls but maybe she could get out of it; they were used to her not showing up at that point, and she was used to coming up with bullshit excuses at this point. Cheerilee kept talking about the book, and the not-quite-spiders kept moving around, sometimes in sync with the cadence of her words. Sunset didn’t get called on again, but once or twice she caught a worried glance from the teacher—but she just kept sitting there with her lips pursed and her gums dry and her eyes as wide open as she could muster, which was maybe too wide but whatever. The bell rang a couple minutes before the clock hit the fifty, and Sunset slid her shit back into her bag and stood up and walked between the desks like all the other kids, and she walked up to the doorway and she hit her head.

The hit was loud and it kind of hurt but she didn’t make any noise, just rasped somewhere low in her throat. Sunset wasn’t even that tall anyway so she wasn’t sure how she could have hit the frame, if that's what she hit, but she just kept walking and if anypony noticed, well, they didn’t say anything, thank goddess. She just kept walking and tried her best to ignore the thick bramble of voices that scratched at her exposed knees, poking and prodding and trying to push her brain out of her skull, but she wouldn’t let them.

Her beeline was towards the bathroom; she just needed to sit down. Sure, she’d been sitting in class but there had been people and someone in the teenage F.B.I. would have said something for sure if she lay her head on her desk and closed her eyes, so of course her old friend the stalls was her destination where she could sit and stare at the ceiling and think about how this used to be tile factory before they turned it into a school and wonder what used to happen in this part of the building and if anyone died there.

“Hey, Sunset!” called a cheery pink voice and, oh no, Sunset turned her head to see one of her friends standing right there across the hall, voluminous pink hair falling every which way in a semi-controlled cavalcading waterfall. “D’ja have a good lit class?”

“Yeah...” Sunset croaked. “It was... lit.”

Pinkie Pie giggled her saccharine giggle—not sugary, but like that weird aftertaste from a sugar-free energy drink that lingers in all the wrong places in your throat—and Sunset felt a hand on her shoulder blade. “What a pun! But it’ll take a lot more than that to dethrone the Queen, heehee.”

Sunset just smiled, weakly, and she followed along with the light push of her friend as they traced the same path as always through the hallways to the cafeteria. Her head finally felt empty, free of noise, which was kind of fucked because it was the exact moment she needed it to not be, but she’d gotten piss-poor at the timing on these things or otherwise just didn’t care. Future Sunset’s problems were never any business of hers... it was always all about the moment. Her arms were so cold and they felt fat and big and maybe they were or maybe that was just her head fucking with her again. She never remembered to check after.

As the hall opened up into the larger room with tables, Sunset’s blackout tunnel vision narrowed and all she could see was the big round one across the way with the rainbow of girls sitting around it, unpacking their lunchboxes and clearly chatting up a storm by the looks of it. Pinkie did all the hard work steering around people moving around like ants in the dirt and soon enough they were moving into chairs and, well, Sunset was finally sitting down, so that’s something.

Still couldn’t put her head down on the table, though, or else—well, actually, maybe it’d be okay, let’s find out, oh it’s not cold but it is flat and hard against her cheekbone but that’s fine, it’s enough, she doesn’t need much. She couldn’t see any of them, either, her gaze facing away from the table into the blurry throng of people.

It took her a second to realise that everything’d gone quiet, but once she noticed it got loud again. “You okay, Sunset?”

It was Twilight who spoke, of course; it was always Twilight.

Twilight, Twilight, Twilight.

“Yeah, ’m good. Tired.” Her jaw hurt.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve barely been getting any sleep either,” Twilight went on, apparently oblivious. The rest of the group went back to their own conversations, buzzing, buzzing “I’m getting super close on this project in my independent study, and, well... when the end of something I’m working on is in sight, I basically just keep working until it gets done.” She laughed—grape sparkles—and somewhere in the back of her head or throat or stomach Sunset felt a pang of regret.

For what? What she was doing was stupid, yeah, but it was her stupid, her decision, her own fuck-up to live and own. She felt bad for Twilight, and the rest of her friends. She felt bad for what would happen if they found out, how they would feel—which was why they couldn’t find out. It didn’t matter if Sunset was hurting herself, but she couldn’t—she could fucking not—hurt her friends, not after everything they did for her, not after all the support, not after the love and the friendship and just everything. She couldn’t do that to them. She couldn’t hurt them again.

A presence got closer. “Sunset... for real, what’s up?” No, Twilight, it’s okay. It’s fine. Please, don’t. All that lies ahead is hurt. There is nothing for you here.

“I’m... I... I don’t know,” Sunset lied. The words were getting harder to produce—she was so cottonmouthed and desperate like a fish out of water. “Don’t worry about. Just... just feeling weird.”

“Okay,” Twilight said, though Sunset could tell she didn’t sound convinced, no not at all. “But if you do need anything, you know you can talk to me, right?”

Sunset gulped, at least as much as she could. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Yeah. Thanks.

Sunset could feel or at least imagine Twilight’s gaze boring holes in the back of her skull, lobotomising something essential from her being, though it probably wasn’t Twilight at all and it was just, well, you know. The table was still hard against her face.

Yeah. Thanks.

A minute passed, and another. The girls were still talking, God bless them, and Sunset’s head receded backwards into itself. Her jaw quivered, and it wasn’t ’til then that she noticed how hard her teeth had pressed together, how sore it was. She lifted a hand to lazily rub at the side of it—but as she pulled it away, she stared at her fingers. Maybe she was just seeing things—wouldn’t be the first time—but they looked nasty, swollen, inflamed. Were they always so crooked? It was like they weren’t hers; she knew all the blemishes and oddities of her own hands, and these just weren’t them.

Maybe they weren’t. Maybe none of this was. Maybe she was living someone else’s life, slipping in and fucking it all up.

She’d done it before. That’s exactly what happened when she showed up at Canterlot High. Why not again? The girls thought she’d changed—and Twilight never even knew her then—but had she, really? Wasn’t she just taking all of that anger, all of that resentment, all of that hunger to make someone hurt, and channelling it back inwards towards herself?

Sunset lifted her head, and as she tried to right it it nearly just fell back down on the table but she kept trying and finally got it almost just about right, at least good enough. Applejack was looking her way with an eyebrow raised, but nevermind that. “Sorry, girls,” Sunset choked out, and as the words started she realised she should have planned this, should have figured out what she was going to say or else maybe she’d slip and fall on the ice. “I’ve... I’ve gotta go. I’m, um. I. Bathroom. Catch you on the flipside.”

It sounded so stilted, so fake—each word a construct holding up the lie, and so transparently too. No one would believe it—no one should believe it—and they’d call her out on her bullshit and under the pressure she’d bend and break and wither away and d—

“Seeya, Sunset!” said Pinkie, from beside her, and Sunset closed her eyes with a wince and managed a toothy smile for the girl, the least she could do. In a moment, Sunset had her backpack on her back and she was up and gone and the girls kept talking and it almost felt like she was back there with them but she wasn’t and her boots squeaked on the tile and she hated how they squeaked but they wouldn’t stop squeaking. It was the type of thing she would have given someone shit for back when she was giving people shit, probably smashing some kid against a locker with a sickening rattle of the metal and she’d make her take her boots off and Sunset would take them and throw them in the dumpster behind the building just because she could.

Sunset was sick, and Sunset was stupid. There was something wrong with her. Something deeply, deeply wrong. In a stall she sat with her boots up on the seat and she closed her eyes and hallucinated cracking open a bottle of cough syrup, breaking through the plastic seal and picking at the paper one under the lid with her fingernails. She hallucinated the icky chemical red stain that often lingered on her fingertips because even though she never really saw the liquid outside the brown bottle she often got just a little on her fingers because it was unavoidable and her hand often slipped. She knew it was a hallucination the whole time this time though and when she was about to drink and gag she cracked an eye and it vanished in an instant like if the drain in her shower suddenly started to work.

And then she closed her eye again and let it happen, again, the same way, the way she’d done it a hundred times, the images burned into her retinas permanently, the repeating frames of a gif looping unto themselves. She shuddered, not from the cold that picked at her skin but the deep internal shudder that made her lurch and nearly fall over onto the floor. Somewhere above the bell rang to signal the start of the class she wasn’t going to, and the sound of the bell echoed around in her skull for minutes after, washing away the cough syrup in a sonic tide and leaving Sunset feeling even more exhausted than before.

She looked back at her hands, the ugly swollen things that probably belonged to someone else, that were grafted on when she wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t want to look at her hands but it was hard to not; she kept flicking back and forth between focusing on the detail of the skin, every pockmark, and it swimming around in disorganised diseased particulars. She just wanted to shed the sick skin, the ugly gross awful itchy everything wrong and she just needed to fall asleep, her eyelids weren’t really heavy per se but that stupid itch not on her skin but in her bones and marrow, deep into the core of her being, that she was the itch the whole world was trying to scratch, to euthanise, to put to sleep. She was the anathema. She had to go.

The temptation was there to just fall back and slip out of consciousness right there, head back on the wall and such, but she knew she’d do it too long and if she didn’t fall then someone would fucking find her and everyone—everyone—would find out and that would be it. So she didn’t and she stood up and sometime later past the ochre-dripping sun and the needlepricks of the breeze on skin she was home and rolled up in the quilt like a joint and she muddled out past the dry suck between her teeth and into something heavy, sick, violent, fictional, colourful, gone.

Gone.

So far gone. Why did she even kid herself?

So far gone that she couldn’t come back. How could she?

She was all on her own and she was so far gone that she didn’t have the words and that’s all there was.

She was gone.

Gone, fucked up, somewhere far in the back of her head, pushed around and not in control.

Why?

Why did she do this to herself?

Every time she had a choice, and every time she made the wrong one.

Every time she fucked the whole thing up.

Everything faded, bled through, sucked down into the mud like an action movie with a shaky camera to show that things aren’t really OK anymore and that it’s serious now.

She didn’t like the way the fluorescent lights felt on her skin; even though her arms were covered by the hoodie sleeves and her forehead was covered by messy bangs it still found its way between her fingers and tracing along her cheeks and jaw. She felt exposed, like every sick sallow detail could be seen by any of the other shoppers, by the rest of the neighbourhood, by the whole entire world. She couldn’t see them but it made her eyes feel even more sunken back into her skull, bags of deep purple sitting like smoke on the water—pfft.

Sunset’s boots squeaked on the confetti tile as she turned the corner into the aisle. The Aisle. The same one she always walked directly to—sometimes as fast as she could as if running away from her own conscience, at other times slowly when she was more clear-headed just in case anyone was watching and might see it as suspicious. Which they probably weren’t, and nobody would do anything even if they were, but she couldn’t help but be anxious. It always made her anxious, skin crawling not just over the current moment but in anticipation of what was to come. Sixty, seventy, eighty minutes from now when she was home and she’d swallowed and spun away the time before the chill started to set in to her bones.

Three-quarters of the way down the aisle, past the bottles of shampoo and lotion and whatever the hell else—she didn’t really pay attention anymore, now that she knew where to go she just ran on autopilot—is where she stopped. And staring her straight in the face were little cardboard boxes among a few small white plastic bottles, both with distinct pastel blue on their labels and packaging. Sleep aid. 50 mg diphenhydramine, 16 or 48 softgels or something, it was different for all of them. Those were better than the bitter little pills to swallow—especially the pink ones, the allergy-marketed ones, the generic Benadryl which going down somehow felt even worse.

Sunset reached up a hand to grab a bottle, but she stopped short at the sight of her fingers just inches away. She knew they were her fingers—they were attached to her hand, after all, and when her brain sent the signal they moved—but they looked knobby and wrong. She knew her hands, having had them her whole life, and something about the way the skin folded and hung together just looked unfamiliar. They bent in odd ways away from each other and if she didn’t know better she’d have thought she was looking at a corpse.

So, Sunset lowered her hand. She closed her eyes a moment and took a long, deep breath. Not now. Not tonight. Her fingers would come back—they always did—but she needed to give them time. She opened her eyes once more, and turned away from the shelf.

A few steps down, and Sunset crouched. Here in front of her face were several other cardboard boxes, most with orange or red on the packaging. Cough relief. Delsym? Too expensive, and though the polistirex went down smoother it just felt blah and numb. DayQuil? Not concentrated enough and too saccharine-sweet, no way she could get enough down without puking. No, the generic brand Robitussin, the “Adult Cough Relief” with no other active ingredients besides the dextromethorphan because those’ll fuck you up good and proper in ways you don’t mean. 354mg per bottle, enough to hit the second plateau.

And they were on sale, two for $5.99. A steal. She couldn’t not buy two! So she found the boxes in her hand and her feet shuffling away down the aisle and towards the self-checkout and scanning the barcodes. Oh, how she used to get something else, maybe a candy or a bar of soap or a package of Chapstick but most of the time now she didn’t unless she really needed that stuff which she didn’t. She never saw anyone she knew at the store, though maybe the cashiers recognised her and knew what she was doing, though she also didn’t know how much other people knew about this stuff. And it wasn’t illegal, anyway. Maybe she had a cold. Maybe she was just stocking up.

Ugh.

She could almost feel their weight in her purse as she crumpled up the receipt and threw it into the trash can, ridding herself of the itemised list of her sins. The walk home wasn’t that long, maybe twenty minutes, but it seemed a lot shorter because she was so used to it so her head tuned out every block, every tree, every building, and all she could think about was the bottle she’d soon be opening and the fake-cherry red liquid that’d make it even more of a blur.

The stairwell felt darker than usual, and Sunset felt uneasy; it was almost like there was a presence, just behind or ahead of her, watching her every move. She kept stopping to look back around the corner—but there never was anything there. She was happy to reach the fourth floor, and quickly shut the door behind her as she spilled out into the hall.

When she reached her hand in her purse to rummage for her keys, her fingers had to push past the cardboard boxes and just the tactile reminder sent a small wave of nausea into her stomach. But her fingers found the metal and pulled it out, the key went into the lock, and soon she was inside with the door shut and standing in the darkened apartment. The only light was the orangey one over the kitchen sink, casting odd shadows over the parts of the living room it could reach.

Sunset took a moment to take off her boots and slide out of her jacket, hanging it up on the rack with the others. Setting her purse on the kitchen counter, she stepped over to a cupboard and pulled out a glass. Or, well, a clear plastic cup. As she filled it with water from the tap, she looked and grimaced at the piles of dirty dishes in both sides of the sink basin. She’d do them... another night. When her head was clearer.

She downed the glass of water in one gulp and filled it back up, this time setting it on the counter by her purse. Yawning, Sunset reached up to one of the cabinets and pulled out a box of generic store-brand Cheez-Its which she also set on the counter. Then, her hands wandered over to the purse and slipped inside, pulling out one of the two boxes. They made short work of the outside and soon she was breaking through the plastic seal and picking at the paper one under the lid with her fingernails. She could see the icky chemical red stain that often lingered on her fingertips because even though she never really saw the liquid outside the brown bottle she often got just a little on her fingers because there was a little bit on the paper seal.

She put the seals and the small plastic measuring cup from atop the lid into the empty cardboard box. And then, pinching her nose tight, she lifted the bottle with the other hand and tipped it, swallowing as much as she could before the flavour could quite register.

It wasn’t as bad as it used to be, that’s for sure, but it was still pretty god damn gross even with her nose pinched and she tried not to think about the overwhelming sense of grossness sliding down her throat because otherwise she was gonna puke and oh Luna she shouldn’t have even thought about puking either and—okay, she stopped, she set it down, it was maybe half full still and she reached a hand over to the crackers and shoved a handful in her mouth and some water to wash it down and get the taste out of her mouth. It seemed almost designed to linger there, to make her want to evacuate it but she did her best to think about anything else. The songs she’d soon be listening to, the schoolwork she wasn’t doing, her friends somewhere out there hopefully safe and happy and having a good time.

Not too much water and it was already mostly washed away and she took the plastic bottle and took another gulp—another half of what was there, less than before. It was worse this time, and the next time when she’d washed it away again and thought she got back to normal it was even worse again, and this time she gagged and could almost feel like she was going to throw up. But she didn’t, and soon her stomach mostly settled, and the whole bottle was gone except for a thin film of liquid that swirled around the bottom when she moved it. She thought about drinking that, too, but the taste wasn’t worth what it’d do—not worth psyching herself up for the gulp.

It was all so stupid, wasn’t it? That’s what Sunset thought about, at least, as she moved her purse over to the small table in the living room, hanging it up on the ear of a chair and letting it dangle down near the floor. In an instant she could commit herself to the next several hours, just a simple decision, and no way to take it back. She didn’t used to know how to decide—found it too easy to get hung up on the possibilities, on the details, on the what-ifs—but she taught herself in the art and soon she was taking the road more fucked up.

She kept going, treading on her socks down the hall to the bedroom and stepping past the pile of boxes she really needed to take care of. On the other side of her bed, there was a pile of clothes—used, distinct from the dwindling pile of clean clothes at the far wall under the window. But it was with the dirty clothes that her pajamas were, right at the top because she’d known she was going to wear them again. As she slid out of her street clothes and into the purpley PJs, she thought her head was getting a little wobbledy... but it was hard to tell if it really was or whether it was the placebo. It was always hard to tell, to begin with at least.

And that’s why she tried to keep her mind off it. Alone at the edge of the universe humming a tune, Sunset spun between her desk and her bed, plucking up her laptop from one and moving it to the other. The dark purple comforter was messy, bed unmade, so Sunset shoved it aside to set the laptop directly down on the sheet. She sat down cross-legged in front of the device, tapping the button to wake it from sleep, and then adjusted her pillows to support her back against the wall. Once she’d moved the laptop onto her outstretched legs, she leaned over to pick up the headphones from the floor where they lay on the edge of the pile of boxes.

Sunset tried not to think about what lay beside her as she plugged the headphones in and let the “Godless” acoustic guitar strums fill both her ears, a wash of sonic colour. Her head was already maybe feeling a little loopy? maybe? ’cause when she turned her head a bit everything kinda bobbed and the guitars sounded a little waterier than usual—flanged, of course, of course. She closed her eyes and saw nothing in particular but that nothing in particular felt kind of funny and when she opened her eyes again she decided maybe she was tired of treading through this song and didn’t want to hear this album so she went and actually just put it on shuffle so she wouldn’t have to think too much about it because having a lot of things to think about was becoming kind of weird and untenable.

Sunset wandered around on the internet a little bit. She saw a few posts by her friends—Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie—on Twitter, but she made sure not to like them or anything else or they might see she was online and try to message her. It took all her might to keep away from the direct message indicator that said she had two unread, because she could never remember if Twitter had read receipts. She couldn’t take any chances.

So she scrolled past these, these and others. Funny videos, memes, selfies, little personal slices of life... something about it seemed so very profound, the fact that all these people were tuned into the same channel, sharing little bits and pieces of themselves. And Sunset, well... she was the detached observer. Not just here on the internet, lurking but not interacting, but it seemed that way with the world at large. She was the outsider, and... well, did she have any real impact? It was hard to tell. Maybe at one point she had, months and months ago, but now she’d pulled away and was smearing the days together with a smudge brush, blurring away traces of her presence.

Sometime after skipping the third punk song, an itch in the back of her head was pulled forward and cracked its eggshell, gooping out into the centre of her cranium to simmer and scramble. The itch was a memory, knowledge, and it pushed her to move—so, off of her legs the laptop went, and whoa the whole world and everything went all out of sorts, akimbo, how she imagined it was like for a spacecraft to drift aimlessly in the vacuum. But unlike the ship she righted herself and everything settled besides the cherry pit in her stomach.

Step by step fluid motional she got downways the hall and stopped in front of the kitchen sink where she leaned down, opened the cupboard door, and started rummaging around in the trash. Yeah, kinda gross, but she could wash her hands right there when she was done and she knew what she was looking for, anyway. Her little raccoon claws paused as they slipped along the smooth plastic, and then she knew she had it and pulled it out. Both her hand and its precious cargo went under the faucet and got a rinse, and then with a quick towel-dry she looked down at the pastel blue.

There were still six gelcaps left, but Sunset had been so sick with herself last time and worried that she might go overboard that she threw it away, even in the trash can and not in the pile. She’d intended to take the trash out to the dumpster in the morning but of course she forgot and so here she was, all high up on cold meds and fishing her sin out of the garbage. She poured them out into her hand, one two three four five six, and stared at the deep blue something for a moment before she dry-swallowed them one by one.

On the second one, she gagged, but she just stopped and kept going.

After the fourth one, she paused to drink a glass of water.

When they were all gone, she let out a long sigh and replaced the bottle in the trash. The cupboard door closing reverberated through the room or at least through her head.

And the water pooled warmly around her feet but she could hardly notice as the whole world spun dizzyingly, turning into blue glass walls. It tasted like the airport, so Sunset knew it was the airport—and the thrum of busy-busy filled the air like a flick had been switched. Somehow it was like she had never left, and she nestled into her space in the shower stream and felt warm even as the cold nipped at her bones. And the girls (the girls!) were around her, sort of at least.

“Everything’s fucked, everything’s fucked, everything’s so fucked.”

Their voices were filled with nothing, barely words seeping through the cracks in her skull and this time she didn’t mumble back nonsuch replies but rasped through the cotton that something was wrong. She pushed in the knob and the water ceased its friendly fire but the fucking drain was still slow to drain so she stood there with the water at the base of her ankles for a moment. Her knees were about to collapse but she had enough forethought to maybe not do that or else she might crack her head for real for real and that’d be a shittier way to go so she pulled herself unsteadily down into a cradling-herself position.

Sunset Shimmer sat with knees-locked-to-chest against the back of the bathtub, staring at the faucet on the far end and trying not to think about the fact that she both was still there but also her head felt like it was folding in unto itself. Pressure, pressure, pressure. She closed her eyes for a second and in that second lived a whole entire life burrowed deep within a sort of hive world with a wife and a daughter and a meh kind of job every nine to five and she remembered the fluffy pancakes with just the right amount of butter on top they made every Sunday night to usher in the week and remind themselves that even through the routine there were these little moments and when Sunset Shimmer opened her eyes, all she saw was the far wall where the grimy faucet pointed straight towards her.

And in a few seconds, she forgot all that too—it just slipped her mind, fell out, and crawled away.

It was Sunday, she suddenly recalled, and tomorrow would be Monday, and tomorrow would be school, and oh goddess there was probably homework she should have been doing, stuff she in theory gave up on the moment she downed the bottle but that still lurked around at the back of her mind because of course why not, it was still possible. In theory.

But she wasn’t even sure if she’d go, now; what was the point if she hadn’t done her work, and why wander around half-dead out of her mind alive as a zombie when every day is exactly the same and the needlepokes keep needlepoking at her brain, asleep and awake too. And then when she spilled out of class onto the front drive among the other students, it’d be the same thing again, and Sunset would watch it all entropically unfold like an umbrella outward just like that.

The smart thing would be to go straight home after school.

The smart thing would be to go to bed and sleep this off.

The smart thing would be don’t go to the store again.

The smart thing would be don’t go down the pharmacy aisle.

The smart thing would be to put the box back.

The smart thing would be to tell the cashier to take it away.

The smart thing would be to drop the box in the trash outside the store.

The smart thing would be to drop the box in the trash outside your apartment.

The smart thing would be to drop the box in the trash inside your apartment.

The smart thing would be don’t open the box right now.

The smart thing would be don’t have any more than a couple.

But what incentive do you have to do the smart thing?

Why not do the stupid thing?

Do you really want to be in your head right now?

It’s not like it’s an accident; it’s not like you don’t know what you’re doing.

Every time, you make the conscious decision, and you reaffirm that decision every step of the way there and back.

It’s all you can think about.

It’s your own damn fault.

It’s your own damn fault.

It’s your own damn fault.

It’s your own damn fault.

It’s your own damn fault.

⠀

Author's Notes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3f6rJ2TDx4