Dear Cozy Glow,

Sunset says you’ll probably never read this, but over the past few days she’s described and shown to me so many wondrous things that I no longer believe in the word “never.” If a parallel world of magic, dragons, and unicorns can exist, so can a troubled little pegasus who is willing to hear herself out.

Do you like making friends, Cozy? My money is on yes, because I definitely do. I love it on a level that goes deeper than any normal person. Listen, what I’m about to tell you is something that took me years of blabbing about my feelings on a couch to understand: Absolutely, positively, the number one scariest thing in this life is to be Alone. More than that, being Alone is death. But that means the opposite is true, right? That means friendship is life. Even more than life, friendship is power.

When I was young (well, I’m still pretty young but you know what I mean) I didn’t have any friends. Sure I had a cute face and adults gave me attention, but I didn’t play nice with others my age. That meant that most of the time I was, you guessed it, Alone. So I invented friends. Together we talked, we played, and even argued, me and those People Who Weren’t There. My parents approved, since imaginary friends was a normal thing for kids without siblings and hey, at least it kept me happy.

I don’t recall when exactly the People Who Weren’t There started telling me to do things. It feels like one day everything was fine, and the next Dad was shaking me by the shoulders, yelling that imaginary or not, friends don’t encourage friends to do the things I did to the neighbor’s cat. The meds and therapy started right after, which made the People Who Weren’t There actually not there. This was good in the long run, I guess, but at the time it meant I was back to being Alone. I don’t think I need to explain why experiencing that again after so many years turned me into a desperate, scheming person.

Are there a lot of mental hospitals in Equestria? Sunset says there’s way more of them here in my world. Does that mean ponies have a lower rate of getting sick in the head than humans do? I hope so. I wouldn’t want my world’s messed up people to exist any place else. But if you, a pony like me is there, that’s at least one. And don’t take this the wrong way, but Equestria seems like too nice of a place to have a term for what we are.

Well I can give you a term, because it’s stamped on an official document that my parents keep in their strongbox: psychotic. I can also give you another easier to pronounce one that I came up with myself: lost soul. You and I put on fake faces because we don’t like who we really are. You and I want as many real friends as we can get, you because you think enough of them will make the People Who Aren’t There go away, and me because I live in fear of them coming back.

Draining the magic out of Equestria wouldn’t have made the voices go away, Cozy. Only meds that don’t exist in your world can do that. This is why I’m enclosing one of my pills in this letter. Sunset thinks the Canterlot School Of Alchemy can figure out what’s inside the pill that makes it work. If they can, it could lead to some peace for you and anyone else in the same boat as us. Something else I’m enclosing is a picture of myself. See, I already have a picture of you, and if you get one of me then neither of us will be Alone. Not in the way that scares us so much.

Write me back if you get the chance. I’m always up for a little bit of “self help.”

Your very very close friend,

Another lost soul

Author's Notes:

“Evil is just a word. Under the skin, it’s simple pain.”

- Eleanor Lamb, Bioshock 2