It wasn't as though you ever really got used to it—living in Equestria, that is. The little things that made up parts of every day on terra firma drifted away like fragments of a dream, recollections of a past you'd once walked as firmly as brick hallway, now mostly just fuzzy recollections and portions of paintings arranged out of order. A face you'd be sure to remember for the rest of your life would one day drift into the storage compartment. Names would sound alike, and only the smiles on faces would help you navigate from day to day.

Samantha liked Equestria. It was, as a general rule, less complicated than her life on Earth had been. Ponies, by nature, didn't seem to enjoy complication. They liked a world that was straightforward and communicated its intentions without duplicity. Possibly this was why there was such a perpetual kerfuffle over mating in Equestria—everypony wanted to do it, and do it simply, but had no means of joining one end of the equation to the other.

It was a Thursday evening. Samantha was at home with a glass of imported wine and a romance novel she'd been chipping away at for the last few weeks. A simple-but-beautiful earth pony is displaced from Equestria to Earth in medieval times, and has to combine her intuitive know-how with help from the locals to survive. Will she ever discover a way to return to her own time and place—or find a love which makes her stay? Samantha had been guessing at the conclusion herself every night before bed. In the end, she preferred something involving a time machine, as that was the most efficient, and lead to the highest volume of sequels.

Rosy Dawn was beside herself with worry. On the one hoof, the new creature, this 'man', was astounding, built differently than any creature she'd previously been acquainted with, towering tall over her like a mythical giant. And while she longed deeply to return to her home, her family and friends which she'd so suddenly left behind... Rosy Glow couldn't help but imagining, in her deepest, darkest, secretest of imaginings, what life would be like if she decided to stay with the human.

If she decided to stay, and let love bloom, in a time between Humans and Hay-Fields.

Samantha wrinkled her nose and took a sip of wine. She hated when the book went out of its way to drop the title somewhere in the middle like that.

Knock knock, came two knocks at the door.

Who's there?

No, you're supposed to say 'Who is it?'...

Samantha folded off the top-right corner of her page, ever the scandalous rulebreaker of the de facto librarian world, then set her book down next to her glass of wine, on the small oak table she'd gotten made a few months ago. She took a moment to adjust herself before getting up; brushing hair into place, making sure her shirt wasn't tucked into her pants—the basic 'appearance groomers' that were still in place since growing up twenty-plus years in conventional human society. Even if ponies didn't notice, you caught yourself doing it anyway, just to feel like you were still at home.

At one point she'd read a study, published several centuries ago, by a pony with a very hard to pronounce name she could no longer remember, about the effects of pony and human cohabitation. Apparently a girl named 'Megan' served as a test-case... In any event, the end predicted result, according to this word-sandwich pony, was complete and total insanity. Utterly irreversible. Often fatal.

So far, after just over a year, Samantha had noticed none of the predicted symptoms. She had, however, noticed an increase in general life quality. Many friends, many more days on which she felt needed and necessary.

An initially sharp decline, then still worryingly slow climb when it came to—

Well, that was what she had her romance novels for, after all.

Still, eventually she did get up. And she did go to the door, and answer it, and see 'who could it be at this hour?', which was in fact 6:45PM, and therefore a highly reasonable hour for somepony to be calling anyway. Possibly the context of life fell away when you were deeply immersed in love-crossed scandals spanning species and timeline.

It was Derpy. Was she the only pony in this town who delivered mail?

"Hi!" Derpy said with an envelope between her teeth. She'd had a lot of practice, and her talent to sound discernible with a mouthful of paper was nothing to scoff at. Whether it was related to bubbles was somepony else's jurisdiction.

"Oh. Hello, Derpy." Samantha felt like she'd forgotten something, maybe a burner left on in the background, though she hadn't cooked anything on the stove in days. Take-out was far easier, and you got to chat with the delivery pegasus as well, which could serve as a good substitute for company when you were really lonely.

"I've got a letter for you," Derpy said after she'd spit the letter out into her hoof. She held it forward for Samantha, smiling obliviously as though the tiny drop of spit wasn't hanging precariously off one of the corners.

"Thanks." Samantha grabbed it by one of the few unsoaked corners and held it at arms length.

A lavish, unadorned silence of a single minute passed by. Derpy smiled obliviously throughout, standing in place on Samantha's doorstep and ignoring the single awkward cough that Samantha forced out at the halfway mark.

"Well," Samantha said, "I guess I'll be going then."

"Okay," Derpy said. She continued to stand, and smile.

"Bye for now," Samantha said.

"Bye!" Derpy said. Standing, smiling.

Samantha was very careful to close the door slowly, so as not to either hit Derpy directly in the face, or knock her off the front-step with a particularly volatile puff of air.

Samantha waited about fifteen seconds before peering through her front-door peephole.

A grey pegasus with a silly smile was there staring back at her.

"Derpy," Samantha said, "are you still standing on my front step?"

"Yep!"

"Do you mind telling me why?"

"Oh... good point."

As though her incomprehensible motivator had been forced into a surreal checkmate, Derpy nodded, doffed her postal hat, and took off with a series of frumpy-looking wing-pushes, toggling her weight between either side before leveling out after the third or fourth bounce and bounding away into the sky.

Samantha watched through the peephole until the grey blob had disappeared. She allowed herself one drawn out, indulgent sigh, before taking herself and her new letter back to the living room, where her glass of wine was still waiting. She took a few sips after sitting, in no more of a hurry to open the letter than Rosy Dawn was to return to her own time and place. A nagging voice from a distant past of college literature classes whined at her to examine the situation for applicable metaphors. She ignored it by finishing her glass of wine.

"Let's see," she said to herself as she picked up the letter. Talking to yourself was a habit everypony seemed to develop in Equestria, and Samantha wasn't immune despite her species variance. The writing on the front of the envelope was swirly, but highly legible, and Samantha found herself scanning a small, but accurate mental dictionary of hoof-writing she'd encountered previously. Not meticulous and regimented enough to be Twilight's, not nearly chaotic enough for Pinkie Pie... no hearts for the dots, so not her old pal Cheerilee... Samantha didn't feel like guessing any longer. She ripped the envelope open at the side, lacking a proper letter opener, and slid the contents out onto the oak table. It was, predictably, a letter, which she unfolded, and began to read.

It was brief, content-wise. Regardless, Samantha smiled after only a few lines, and even laughed when she'd finished reading. She read the letter a second time, bobbing her head a little as she bounced over each syllable, murmuring some of the lines to herself at barest minimum volume, a vibration that was barely detectable even by her own ears.

When she'd finished reading the letter a second time, Samantha set it down on the table. She poured herself a second glass of wine, a swirl of rich, dark cherry colour, and downed half of it in one go, closing her eyes as she swallowed and opening them as she finished. Her eyes held new, bright sparkles, as brilliant as the wine.

"That," she said to herself, "sounds like exactly what I need right now."

She took a little time to finish the rest of her second glass, then poured herself a third and began to write a reply. By the time she finished it, her third glass was gone, and she felt pleasantly buzzed on the way up the stairs to bed, where she tossed around the words of her reply in her head for a while, searching to know she had chosen the best arrangement, before giving up and masturbating twice, in the favorite way she liked to do, with a big pillow stuffed between her legs, clenching and grinding on it like she'd done when she was a horny and confused middle-schooler without access to proper sex-toys. Even now, with a range of dildos to choose from, person to pony and everything inbetween, she still found herself drawn to the familiar comfort of that old, squishy pillow, rubbing against her clit as she rocked back and forth on top of it.

One more, she caught herself saying, breathless and sweaty. One more, and then I'll go to sleep.