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...I'm not important enough to write about but a pony named Chance is...
Anyways I don't really have a good place to put this but I need to put it out there or it'll never settle.
So far I'm up to two chapters of a thinly-veiled autobiographical story called Along Came a Spider.
Don't read too much into it. I need to put it out into the universe or it'll just sit and rot. And I don't believe I've ever told the story completely. (As complete as it is at the moment. You can't easily summarize a life into a couple of chapters. Well, not and get any depth that is.)
Anyways feel free to ignore it.
Along Came A Spider - Chapter 1 - by RandomGreymane
===================
My first memories were of a spider. I was a tiny foal, barely birthed but shakily taking my first steps in the world.
We were gathered at my grandmare’s house, as we often were, which still amazes me to this day as my grandmare’s house was pretty small. It was meant to be a temporary house while grandpa slowly built the main house. (Grandpa passed away the year before I was born. From all the stories I’m both happy and sad that I never met him.)
Grandma’s kitchen was no bigger than twice that of a garden shed. The “dining room” was the about two thirds of that size and set off at right angles to it.
In the center, right-hoof, was a small laminated kitchen table with a flat steel edge running around the outside. The pattern, I recall, was this sharp white with speckles in it that varied from coal black to slight grey in color. It was kind of like as if someone had bleached a robin’s egg and used the shell to fill in the top of the table.
Around it my aunts and uncles sat, their voices only partially decipherable to my young ears. Each of them sipping the drink of their choice, mostly coffee, and re-hashing the family gossip with vigor.
In the farthest left-hoof corner was an old icebox. (Refrigerators existed by then, and my grandmare had one, but she kept the old wooden icebox because it made good storage. And grandma was always keen on not throwing things away if there was another purpose for them.)
As I wobbled past the front of the lower doors, and rested a hoof on them to steady myself, an enormous spider came skittering out into the light right in front of me.
I was shocked. I stood there staring intently at the spider. Partly fascinated but more than a little afraid. I remember that it looked so large to me at the time, especially the eyes, as large as the hoof of a full grown stallion.
One of my uncles, Uncle Hairy, noticed me staring. “What are you waiting for colt? Step on it!”
Without opening my mouth I slowly shook my head. I didn’t have the words to express myself so I just stood there. I didn’t want to get bit, or get spider all over my hoof.
Uncle Hairy looked me over and expressed himself with an irritated snort. “Salvia what kind of colt are you raising here?”
His tone was so harsh that I started to cry and immediately ran into the nearby living room to get away from him.
“Oh leave him alone Hairy!” my mother exclaimed in exasperation “He’s still very young!”
“He’s a dullard is what he is.” Hairy replied with a snort.
“Oh hush!” my mother scolded.
A moment later she entered the living room and picked me up to comfort me. Slowly the emotions of the moment subsided and I stopped crying. Mom always made things better back then.
From that point on though I had a healthy fear of Uncle Harry and avoided him whenever possible. (I still do.)
My mother was a certified nurse’s aide back then and worked at a nearby hospital in Coltcago. She worked long hours and her and my father didn’t get along. In truth I know that the issue was me - I wasn’t expected. I saw a photo years later of my parents getting married in the courthouse - she was at least 6 month pregnant with me when the photo was taken.
Not to say that my father wasn’t a good stallion. He did his best, always, to provide for our family. That meant he worked long hours. He was a unicorn and was one of the first ponies to maintain the new automated spell clusters that kept track of the bits that flowed back and forth between what passed for modern businesses back then.
One year they had a fight and my mother left him. She took me to grandma’s and we lived with her in the tiny house for a full year before moving back in with my father.
Living with grandma was a striking change to say the least. I wasn’t old enough to start school yet so I spent my days in the tiny house and on the surrounding ten acres.
This was absolutely fantastic to me and far different than my previous few years in the big city.
My grandmare delighted in showing me around her 10 acres of farm. There were no animals except the one dog, but she showed me just about every inch of that property. (If she didn’t, my Uncle Jimmy did. I never realized how odd his name sounds. Jimmy.)
One day she took my hoof and led me out of the house. There was a large apple tree there that shaded the entire front yard. She had a bucket in her hands that had something in it that I couldn’t see.
We stopped just past the tree and waited while she scanned the nearby treetops of the small orchard across the other side of the driveway.
Without a word she nodded her head sharply. There was a rustle in one of the trees, the pear tree I think, and a large bird took flight.
It was jet black and it’s wings were ENORMOUS. I remember being surprised when it landed in front of us and was taller than my grandmare when she was sitting, and twice my size. He was shiny, and black, and every bit the largest raven I’d ever seen.
“This...” my grandmare said as she pointed a hoof in the raven’s direction “...is Night Wind. He’s visits from time to time.”
The raven bent his head to one side so his right eye was clearly focused on me. “He doesn’t speak.” my grandmare continued “Or at least he hasn’t since I’ve known him.”
My grandmare put the bucket on the ground and reached into it to toss something to the crow. I was too mesmerized by the sheen of the black feathers to notice or remember what it was. Night Wind immediately attacked the offering and swallowed it whole. She repeated this action a few times then stopped.
“You can touch him if you want.” she whispered softly to me. “Just don’t look directly in his eyes or he’ll peck yours out.”
I was trembling. I could reach out to this wonderful thing in front of me? Really? I moved slowly forward and when I got close enough I brushed my hoof down the side of one wing, careful to look at the wing itself and not Night Wind’s eyes.
The bird regarded me with a look of intense observation. I knew that if I made the wrong move I would be pecked and pecked hard. But, oddly, I wasn’t afraid.
Gathering what remained of my courage, I moved right up to Night Wind and carefully put my forelegs around him and gently hugged him. I may have imagined it but I think he leaned into me a little bit. (My memories aren’t what they used to be.) I remember he smelled like clean air. Like nothing of the earth had ever laid a hoof on those ink-black wings. He smelled like winter snow, and summer breezes, and all those times the air moved without any visible source and brought a freshness with it.
After a time, I released Night Wind and backed away to stand next to my grandmare. With little fanfare, and a noise that sounded suspiciously like derision, Night Wind spread his gigantic wings and launched himself into the sky.
I watched him disappear over the treetops and slowly became aware of my grandmare grinning at me. “Like him?”
I nodded mutely.
“We’ll see him next year.” she said as she raised her head to follow the dwindling black speck.
And, as with many things, grandma was right. Night Wind visited us the next year. And the next. And the next. Then one year...he didn’t appear.
I was crushed. I’d come to expect that quiet moment of peace filled with shiny blackness. That moment when I felt...connected.
And now it was gone.
In one moment my world was amiss. Like having the proverbial rug pulled out from under you or missing that last step on the stairs before you hit the floor unexpectedly.
I miss him still.
But life, as it does, moves on. Eventually my parents reconciled and we moved back to the city to live in an apartment in one of the internal neighborhoods that my parents deemed suitable for the entire family.
I was in preschool at the time and I remember not doing well. I wanted to do nothing but play and I couldn’t understand why nobody else wanted to do so as well.
After several notes from my teachers about my activities, my mother scheduled an appointment for us to visit a special doctor. I didn’t know at the time but it was a developmental specialist.
I remember entering the office and a nurse taking me aside and having me try different things. I distinctly remember the old-style “square peg, round hole” test. I happily was playing as I attempted to force a block where it wouldn’t fit in the frame.
After a time, my mother entered the room and we both sat down next to the doctor I’d seen her go off with when we came in. I’ll never forget his first words:
“Your colt is not a genius.” he said after he had reviewed the paperwork the nurse had written up.
“Well...okay...” my mother replied. “What are his prospects?”
“He will be good for nothing more than pushing a broom.” the doctor continued.
I can’t remember all of what happened next. She had such a mixed look on her face during the walk home. Looking back, it was a mixture alternating between both sadness and anger.
After that things changed a little. My mother read to me a lot and had me do a lot of little things that felt a lot like school. Eventually I moved from kindergarten to the formal Celestial school across the street.
I remember the teachers of the Celestial Sisterhood being extremely strict. More than once I got my hooves smacked with a ruler for not paying attention. I did horrible in classes and was behind all the time. In time I made friends that lasted with me the entire time we lived in the city. Mostly other ponies who had similar problems with school that I did.
In case you’ve never been to a big city like Coltcago, the buildings aren’t usually built with peaked roofs like in smaller towns and villages. They are flat with gutters on the sides that collect the water and guide it into the storm sewers.
My friends and I regularly would use a nearby mulberry tree to make our way onto a ladder that led to one of the roofs. And since all the roofs were close together...well you get the idea.
I remember one time we were on a roof that overlooked a street with shops and people walking back and forth on it. We were hanging our heads over the sides of a low block wall on the front of the building. The space behind the wall was littered with the leftovers of some long-gone gang of construction ponies. A brick here, an iron spike there, that sort of thing.
I picked up and iron spike to look at it.
“Drop it over the side!” one of my friends said. (In retrospect Tank wasn’t the brightest of ponies. His ego far outweighed the thin and wiry stature of his frame.) “Drop it! I dare you!”
“Umm...” I was undecided. I mean I knew enough that I could hurt somepony. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“C’mon! I double dare you!” Tank exclaimed, jumping up and down now. “Take a chance Chance!”
Okay, yeah, my parents named me Chance. It was the most popular pony name for years until recently. I’ve never been comfortable with the name really...where was I.
Tank was still waiting on my answer, hopping from one set of hooves to the other. “C’monnnnn!” he whined.
I don’t know what happened next really. I think Tank sat the steel bar on top of the edge of the building and when I turned I knocked it off. Or I might have purposefully knocked it off. To this day I’m not sure. Regardless it fell to the ground on the sidewalk with a loud clang! The ponies on the sidewalk looked up at us and one of them started yelling. “You could have hurt somepony badly!” the stallion said angrily. “You all just wait there while I call the guards!” he continued.
We of course weren’t going to wait for that to happen. We turned and galloped across multiple rooftops until we were far away.
I can laugh about the experience now but in hindsight it was the first time I really realized that my actions had serious consequences for others. It was the first time I realized that something I did could seriously hurt someone.
That didn’t sit too heavy on my mind though at that age of course. I was too focused on having fun and trying to understand the ponies and world around me.
About the middle of my third year at school we moved out to a suburb named Nailtown. It was kind of a mixed blessing because my sister and I got our own rooms finally but it meant I lost all my friends and had to make new ones.
I don’t make friends easily, nor let them go...
On top of all this my parents continued to fight a considerable amount. It wasn’t like an argument each night, maybe every other night. Still bad but not bad enough to be unlivable. (Though more than once I thought about running away.)
I did even more poorly in school than I’d done before. Each time I failed my mother told me it was okay but my father got angry. If you’ve ever heard the expression ‘Child of the crop’ you know how he reacted often. I learned really quickly not to make him angry.
There’s so much that happened when we lived here it’s hard to fit it all into a framework. This is true of my life all over. It’s all so...disjointed. Like everything is happening at once and I have to take myself and puff myself up to not be affected by it all. Kind of like how you have to turn up the light to burn away the fog. It gets more difficult to brighten that light as I get older.
The friends I made were good ones for the most part. A few were fair-weather but not the core group.
During school I was put into extra classes to deal with a lisp I’d developed but for the most part I did just as badly as I had done previously in school. I tried, I really did, but no matter what I couldn’t grasp the things I needed.
To top it all off, I had developed a hairless patch on the top of my head. The bullies started calling me “Hole In One”.
During one of the teasing sessions I just stood there unable to rebut any of their insults. Suddenly a filly about my age came up and shooed them all away.
“Don’t worry!” she said after they left. “I am missing hair too!” She pulled a knit cap off her head to reveal large empty spots as if she’d been shaved wrong. “Call me Patch.” she said cheerily.
I don’t know what it was about her but I immediately trusted her. Despite the insults and innuendo she and I started hanging out. One day I heard she was sick so I went to her house with some cookies for a gift.
She was in her bedroom. As I entered I was so surprised at how white it was. Like everything had been bleached and the only color left was the bright lack of it.
She explained that she was very sick but that I shouldn’t worry. We played games and talked and just existed as if the world outside was so much empty. In time she was tired so I went home.
Over the course of the next few months we met in that room and one day she explained to me that she might have to go away. It was a tough concept for me. But I think I understood because I was in love with her. Truly in love. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same way with anyone else in Equestria.
Then one day I showed up at the house and stood there on the wide flagstone. Her parents were stacking moving boxes on the front porch. The conversation still sits with me.
“Is Patch here?” I asked.
“No she’s not Chance.” her mother replied.
My mouth was not sure what to say next. I looked at the boxes. “...did she die?” I asked quietly. “Because she told me once that she might.”
Both of them suddenly had tears welling up in their eyes and for several long moments they didn’t speak. Grandma taught me to be patient sometimes so I said nothing.
Finally, Patch’s father spoke, “We are moving to Prance so she can get better treatment.”.
To this day I’m not sure if those words were lies or the truth. They felt false.
“Tell her I miss her.” I told them, my eyes welling up. “Tell her I love her.”
It was at that point her parents broke down and openly cried. I couldn’t confront this so I ran. I galloped most of the way home and sat in my room and cried.
This memory has stayed with me for all my life. And to this day I still think about her from time to time. I don’t even recall her real name, her cutie mark, or much else about her. The truly sad part is I never knew what happened to her. I never took the time to go find out and I don’t think I’ll ever do so. I think...I think I still love her. Insane and foolish of me, I know. But there it is.
Without Patch around the bullying intensified. I endured it because there was really nothing else I could do. I cried so much that it only increased the insults with “Crybaby!” and other similar things. I found some relief by hiding away.
The house that my parents purchased had a crawl space underneath it. It was to all appearances a basement that had been made of poured concrete but then filled back in with very tiny gravel. A grown pony couldn’t stand up in it. I couldn’t even fully stand up in it, but it was secluded, had plenty of room, and above all it was quiet.
It was perfect.
I can’t tell you how many times I hid down there. The opening in the floor was in my room so I could hide down there whenever I wanted.
So many times I hid down there with a bean bag and a lantern and read fantasy books. It was my escape, my release. It allowed me to recover from being forced to be around all the other ponies that insisted that I was the ‘weird’ one. It was blissfully silent of noise It was the one place I was able to just lose myself in my thoughts or a book.
I read so many stories back then. Stories of rockets! Stories of knights! Stories of magic! And not the everyday kind of magic that unicorns use but the spectacular kind that moved mountains and brought the stars to my hands.
In time I balanced a little bit and was able to spend more time outside of the “pit” as my family called it. (My sister hid down there with me as well from time to time but she was more an extrovert than I will ever be so it wasn’t often.)
Then something happened. The school I was attending got in a system of automated spell clusters of the same type my father worked on.
My father had already introduced me to them by taking me to his workshop once or twice. I was always mesmerized by how the spells he crafted created things that worked, things that moved, things that produced one number from the ones given it. I hated math but I loved this!
This was actually my second introduction to these clusters. When we were still living in Coltcago, after my parents got back together, my father brought one of the sub-clusters home to do some work on it. It wasn’t much, all bland and frankly a little ugly. But he taught me how to do some things with it. And I enjoyed every bit of it. It made sense. It was organized. It wasn’t like all the strange and fluctuating things I had to deal with where ponies were concerned. But he had to give it back when we moved out of the city. I didn’t see another cluster until I entered the middle grades.
I was hooked to say the least. Every spare moment I spent involved with those systems. The teachers tried to use it to motivate me at my other classes but often I ignored them until I couldn’t. I worked at bringing up my grades because I finally had something that I could wholly understand! I couldn’t let them take that away from me.
So I worked harder. I brought my grades up. I didn’t make any more friends than I already had, but I suddenly fit into the structure around me. People knew where I stood finally. They understood. they still teased me and insulted me and excluded me. But they accepted me.
And of course it had to all fall through. My parents decided to move from Nailville to another suburb further out called Lattice Lake.
When I found out we were moving I begged and pleaded that we find some solution so could at least finish out my 3rd year at the upper grades. I tried and tried to find a solution but time and time again the answer came up with a harsh bleakness. “I’m sorry but you can’t finish school if you don’t live in the area.”
I was crushed. I would be starting all over again. I would be losing all my friends again. And that’s exactly what happened.
It was pure hell of a different order...
Along Came A Spider - Chapter 2 - by RandomGreymane
===================
As expected it was more than a little problematic.
Here is was, thrown into a completely different environment. It was so confusing because it was at once some of the same dung I’d experienced but also different.
It was the same group of ponies...jocks, nerds, ponies with their snoots in the air, and all of them still with more bits than I’d see. I think I made three friends in that whole time. One of which died in a cart crash.
I was pretty alone. And it didn’t help that no matter what I did, nothing seemed to help. My grades slipped again but were just barely tolerable. I failed the Equestrian Constitution Test once and had to take a class to do it again. In the end I went an extra year of upper grades before graduating. In some ways that worked out - I had a year of half day schedules - but in most it set me back.
Once school was done it was time for me to look into university schooling. I was still interested in the crystal clusters and their components but there was no way I could afford anything more than the local community site. So I enrolled there. I paid my tuition by working selling cart parts and took as many classes on weekends and nights that I could.
I did make a life-long friend there who I still talk to today. However overall the experience was mixed. I had some instructors I couldn’t stand, and others that I wanted to teach all my classes. In the end I was able to get a simple certification in the components of the crystal structures. That was enough to land me a simple job building and repairing the smaller ones.
It was a sweet job for a long time. I worked long hours, traveled to different businesses, and learned things I would have never learned any other way. And, for a time, I was paid what I was worth and for how hard I worked.
Like many things in my life, that didn’t last.
The owner of the business became involved with the Stellarite Cult and very soon he was pushing his rhetoric onto myself and the others working for him. He changed the pay system from hourly to a different one so that we were paid less. He required us to attend Stellarite instruction. In the end I started believing in the Stellarite Way of doing things.
During all this, I met and wed my long-time marefriend. We even had our child while in the cult. We didn’t stay in it long after that. They didn’t pay us for our work really, and we almost lost everything we owned and all we held dear. Somewhere in the process we moved back in with my mother and father. We ended up giving all we earned to help support that house as my parents divorced and neither was working.
We started new jobs at different places and washed our hands of the cult. The fresh start was painful, but we started moving up again rather than down. I started a good job doing matrix support for a small fastener company, and my mare got a job working at an advertising firm.
We also learned that our foal had issues of the mind. She didn’t talk at all until she was much older and showed problems learning. Among many other things. The doctor bills mounted of course as we tried to find some way to help her.
In the end, the center could not hold. My mother announced that she was selling the house to my sister and moving.
We had no place to go. Well...this isn’t strictly true. My mare and our daughter had someplace to go. My mother-in-law stated that it would be okay for my spouse and our daughter to move in with them but not myself.
While we were planning for this, a friend of mine’s father had to move out to Californeigha to keep his sales job. His house was paid for, and he didn’t want to sell it, so he offered to let us rent/house-sit it while he was gone. (My friend was moving out there as well to pursue his long-time marefriend.)
This was Celestia Sent! We didn’t have to split up our family and it was a wonderful, and inexpensive, house to live in! And for a few years we were happy. I had moved on to a full manager’s position at another company and it paid very well. She had moved to a position in Purchasing at a book warehouse. We had enough money and we worked and paid off most of our bills.
In time, my friend’s relationship fell through and he moved back to the area. I saw how lost he was, so I offered to let him move back into his old room until he could get back on his feet. (I didn’t realize how bad a mistake this was at the time.) So we moved our stuff out of that room and he moved back in.
And that’s where another round of trouble started. Nothing we did was good enough for his parent’s house. We did things “wrong” in every manner. We ended up becoming silently subservient to him. To the point where we let the house maintenance slip because we just couldn’t take being told we were wrong any more.
After a time, and at least once incident where his parents confronted us about the state of the house, they informed us that they would be moving back in.
Wait...I’m missing an important memory here...
Daisy. I’m missing Daisy.
Daisy Rain was my cousin on my mother’s side. I was extremely close to her and another cousin named Dive. We used to get together after family gatherings to have coffee and talk for hours. Daisy and I would talk via spell-cluster for long hours and trade scroll messages regularly. We talked of everything from philosophy to magick and even family history. We talked all the time.
Then, one day, the phrase ‘She’s made her decision. She’s made her choice.’ came to me. It was like someone plucked a string inside me and it vibrated the message. Stranger still, it appeared in phrases in the plays I watched, in the papers, even in messages I received from others. It felt...bad...dark...ominous.
Now please understand that our family contains many gifts. Gifts of magick. Gifts of prophecy. Gifts...somehow I knew this one was related to someone in trouble.
I spent two days contacting people by dragon-scroll trying to find out where the trouble was. Two. Days. Not once did I think to contact Daisy.
Two Days later...I got a scroll from my mother. Daisy...Daisy had obtained a combat-magick scroll...and...in the basement of her duplex...placed it on her head and activated it. All that was left was a mark on the wall and a blood-soaked couch.
It was only then that I understood the purpose of the message. The universe had given me a chance to help her.
The universe had given me a golden opportunity to save her.
And I failed. I failed miserably. That still haunts me to this day. Intellectually I know that I likely couldn’t have stopped her. She’d have tried later, or found another way. But I was given the golden chance that so many others weren’t. And I blew it.
Dive and I don’t speak any more.
Her death was a turning point of sorts in my life. I tried to do more with less. But I failed at that as well.
I don’t think I’ve ever truly gotten over her passing. The tears are still there to cry even though I let them out afterwords. They probably will always still be there until I too pass into the arms of the Guardian of Dreams.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be whole again. At least that’s what I tell myself when I reach out mentally and she’s not there. She taught me so much about how my life and our family gifts work. I’ll always miss her.
Moving on...
My friend’s father informed us that, thanks to those flank-heads in the Equestrian Council who caused the value of the bit to tank, he had been released from his position and would be moving back soon.
My mare and I were looking for our own place, and this only accelerated the process. We purchased a small red and black single-story house and promptly moved in. (A note to perhaps help somepony in the same position - don’t ever overpay for a house, and get RID of things BEFORE you move. Ask me how I know.)
And just like that, once again, we were happy for a time. The house gave us a place that was truly ours and we were able to get rid of a couple of bills with the money made in the deal. We moved in.
And then I became unemployed myself a year or so later.
Fortunately we were able to pull out money from our retirement and pay off our remaining debts that were not involved in the mortgage of the house. The unemployment funds we received via the Celestia Employment Agency kept us afloat. Fortunately, my spouse remained employed during all this.
When you have time to think, you learn. It’s unavoidable. I learned several things while I was unemployed.
I learned I could be artistically creative. I learned that I was something worthwhile to everypony but an employer looking for someone to hire. I learned more about how my mind worked. And...I learned that I had been abused earlier in life. Or at least learned that those fleeting moments of pain and terror that I’d been having since childhood weren’t “just me”.
It was the same sort of scandals that you read in the papers. Young colt becomes an acolyte of The Church Of The Sun Princess, young colt gets threatened with being sent to Tartarus, young colt is taken into a private room and...well...you know. Those memories, what was left of them, were very old. From when I was young and living in Nailville.
Doctor Whooves once said “You can always tell the shape of something that’s missing by the hole it left.”, and that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with here. I can recall the abuse of friends. I can recall the warnings from them about the priests. I can even remember walking in on a colt crouched on the floor of a tiny room in the back of the church. Another of the colts hustled me out before I asked too many questions. There was even one very young colt who killed himself by setting fire to his home and locking his bedroom door.
The shape of the hole is quite clear. And so are the ripples of how it has affected me through the years. It’s the reason I hate cream sauces. The reason I can’t eat eggs that are rubbery when I had no problem with them as a child - they gag my throat and an image flashes in my mind in an instant. An obscene image, along with a particular smell. It’s the reason my reactions in the privacy of our bedroom are so strange, and always have been.
Yet another thing I’ll never be free of. I don’t have the insurance nor the bits to see someone about the memories.
In time, after some temporary jobs, I found a position with another company and worked my flank off the moment I set hoof through the door.
And I haven’t stopped since.
I work at least 50+ hours a week. For a while I was in the overnight rotation for emergency scroll alerts for the cluster networks.
Eventually I moved into assigning out those scrolls instead of handling. It’s not nearly the bits I was getting before I was originally laid off, but it’s enough if we spend it carefully. Sometimes we don’t. Heck, a lot of time we don’t.
The long hours at all my jobs, the bad eating, the lack of exercise, the time I was unemployed, they’ve all taken their toll. My body is now damaged enough that I can’t eat certain things, have to take medicine every day, and have pain in my hind legs every night when I try and fall asleep. Not to mention the failed operation that took away my ability to be intimate. *cough*
And....I’m going blind now. The failure in my body, has damaged by eyes so much that they bleed inside. It hasn’t caused a loss of vision - just blurriness for now - but it’s progressive. And there is no cure. Even the best spells only temporarily alleviate the situation.
I’ve come to terms with it. In a few years I’ll likely be blind. That means I’ll be unable to work and have to go on Lunar Disability.
So...in the meantime...I’m trying to get everything handed over to my loving mare before things get out of hoof. We still have a lot of debts, but we’re working to get rid of them. I don’t want her to have to deal with those as well as the current load.
And that’s where we stand now. I’m going blind. We are in debt. We never seem to have enough.
This doesn’t feel fair. But the universe isn’t fair. And others have it far worse than we do. I guess the best I can do it try and make sure I’m not a burden to those around me until the time comes for me to move on.
I often feel like I did something to deserve this. And perhaps, in another life, I have. But I can’t think of anything this time around that would fit the bill.
This is Chance, signing off. Thanks for listening and Luna Bless You.
Anyways I don't really have a good place to put this but I need to put it out there or it'll never settle.
So far I'm up to two chapters of a thinly-veiled autobiographical story called Along Came a Spider.
Don't read too much into it. I need to put it out into the universe or it'll just sit and rot. And I don't believe I've ever told the story completely. (As complete as it is at the moment. You can't easily summarize a life into a couple of chapters. Well, not and get any depth that is.)
Anyways feel free to ignore it.
Along Came A Spider - Chapter 1 - by RandomGreymane
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My first memories were of a spider. I was a tiny foal, barely birthed but shakily taking my first steps in the world.
We were gathered at my grandmare’s house, as we often were, which still amazes me to this day as my grandmare’s house was pretty small. It was meant to be a temporary house while grandpa slowly built the main house. (Grandpa passed away the year before I was born. From all the stories I’m both happy and sad that I never met him.)
Grandma’s kitchen was no bigger than twice that of a garden shed. The “dining room” was the about two thirds of that size and set off at right angles to it.
In the center, right-hoof, was a small laminated kitchen table with a flat steel edge running around the outside. The pattern, I recall, was this sharp white with speckles in it that varied from coal black to slight grey in color. It was kind of like as if someone had bleached a robin’s egg and used the shell to fill in the top of the table.
Around it my aunts and uncles sat, their voices only partially decipherable to my young ears. Each of them sipping the drink of their choice, mostly coffee, and re-hashing the family gossip with vigor.
In the farthest left-hoof corner was an old icebox. (Refrigerators existed by then, and my grandmare had one, but she kept the old wooden icebox because it made good storage. And grandma was always keen on not throwing things away if there was another purpose for them.)
As I wobbled past the front of the lower doors, and rested a hoof on them to steady myself, an enormous spider came skittering out into the light right in front of me.
I was shocked. I stood there staring intently at the spider. Partly fascinated but more than a little afraid. I remember that it looked so large to me at the time, especially the eyes, as large as the hoof of a full grown stallion.
One of my uncles, Uncle Hairy, noticed me staring. “What are you waiting for colt? Step on it!”
Without opening my mouth I slowly shook my head. I didn’t have the words to express myself so I just stood there. I didn’t want to get bit, or get spider all over my hoof.
Uncle Hairy looked me over and expressed himself with an irritated snort. “Salvia what kind of colt are you raising here?”
His tone was so harsh that I started to cry and immediately ran into the nearby living room to get away from him.
“Oh leave him alone Hairy!” my mother exclaimed in exasperation “He’s still very young!”
“He’s a dullard is what he is.” Hairy replied with a snort.
“Oh hush!” my mother scolded.
A moment later she entered the living room and picked me up to comfort me. Slowly the emotions of the moment subsided and I stopped crying. Mom always made things better back then.
From that point on though I had a healthy fear of Uncle Harry and avoided him whenever possible. (I still do.)
My mother was a certified nurse’s aide back then and worked at a nearby hospital in Coltcago. She worked long hours and her and my father didn’t get along. In truth I know that the issue was me - I wasn’t expected. I saw a photo years later of my parents getting married in the courthouse - she was at least 6 month pregnant with me when the photo was taken.
Not to say that my father wasn’t a good stallion. He did his best, always, to provide for our family. That meant he worked long hours. He was a unicorn and was one of the first ponies to maintain the new automated spell clusters that kept track of the bits that flowed back and forth between what passed for modern businesses back then.
One year they had a fight and my mother left him. She took me to grandma’s and we lived with her in the tiny house for a full year before moving back in with my father.
Living with grandma was a striking change to say the least. I wasn’t old enough to start school yet so I spent my days in the tiny house and on the surrounding ten acres.
This was absolutely fantastic to me and far different than my previous few years in the big city.
My grandmare delighted in showing me around her 10 acres of farm. There were no animals except the one dog, but she showed me just about every inch of that property. (If she didn’t, my Uncle Jimmy did. I never realized how odd his name sounds. Jimmy.)
One day she took my hoof and led me out of the house. There was a large apple tree there that shaded the entire front yard. She had a bucket in her hands that had something in it that I couldn’t see.
We stopped just past the tree and waited while she scanned the nearby treetops of the small orchard across the other side of the driveway.
Without a word she nodded her head sharply. There was a rustle in one of the trees, the pear tree I think, and a large bird took flight.
It was jet black and it’s wings were ENORMOUS. I remember being surprised when it landed in front of us and was taller than my grandmare when she was sitting, and twice my size. He was shiny, and black, and every bit the largest raven I’d ever seen.
“This...” my grandmare said as she pointed a hoof in the raven’s direction “...is Night Wind. He’s visits from time to time.”
The raven bent his head to one side so his right eye was clearly focused on me. “He doesn’t speak.” my grandmare continued “Or at least he hasn’t since I’ve known him.”
My grandmare put the bucket on the ground and reached into it to toss something to the crow. I was too mesmerized by the sheen of the black feathers to notice or remember what it was. Night Wind immediately attacked the offering and swallowed it whole. She repeated this action a few times then stopped.
“You can touch him if you want.” she whispered softly to me. “Just don’t look directly in his eyes or he’ll peck yours out.”
I was trembling. I could reach out to this wonderful thing in front of me? Really? I moved slowly forward and when I got close enough I brushed my hoof down the side of one wing, careful to look at the wing itself and not Night Wind’s eyes.
The bird regarded me with a look of intense observation. I knew that if I made the wrong move I would be pecked and pecked hard. But, oddly, I wasn’t afraid.
Gathering what remained of my courage, I moved right up to Night Wind and carefully put my forelegs around him and gently hugged him. I may have imagined it but I think he leaned into me a little bit. (My memories aren’t what they used to be.) I remember he smelled like clean air. Like nothing of the earth had ever laid a hoof on those ink-black wings. He smelled like winter snow, and summer breezes, and all those times the air moved without any visible source and brought a freshness with it.
After a time, I released Night Wind and backed away to stand next to my grandmare. With little fanfare, and a noise that sounded suspiciously like derision, Night Wind spread his gigantic wings and launched himself into the sky.
I watched him disappear over the treetops and slowly became aware of my grandmare grinning at me. “Like him?”
I nodded mutely.
“We’ll see him next year.” she said as she raised her head to follow the dwindling black speck.
And, as with many things, grandma was right. Night Wind visited us the next year. And the next. And the next. Then one year...he didn’t appear.
I was crushed. I’d come to expect that quiet moment of peace filled with shiny blackness. That moment when I felt...connected.
And now it was gone.
In one moment my world was amiss. Like having the proverbial rug pulled out from under you or missing that last step on the stairs before you hit the floor unexpectedly.
I miss him still.
But life, as it does, moves on. Eventually my parents reconciled and we moved back to the city to live in an apartment in one of the internal neighborhoods that my parents deemed suitable for the entire family.
I was in preschool at the time and I remember not doing well. I wanted to do nothing but play and I couldn’t understand why nobody else wanted to do so as well.
After several notes from my teachers about my activities, my mother scheduled an appointment for us to visit a special doctor. I didn’t know at the time but it was a developmental specialist.
I remember entering the office and a nurse taking me aside and having me try different things. I distinctly remember the old-style “square peg, round hole” test. I happily was playing as I attempted to force a block where it wouldn’t fit in the frame.
After a time, my mother entered the room and we both sat down next to the doctor I’d seen her go off with when we came in. I’ll never forget his first words:
“Your colt is not a genius.” he said after he had reviewed the paperwork the nurse had written up.
“Well...okay...” my mother replied. “What are his prospects?”
“He will be good for nothing more than pushing a broom.” the doctor continued.
I can’t remember all of what happened next. She had such a mixed look on her face during the walk home. Looking back, it was a mixture alternating between both sadness and anger.
After that things changed a little. My mother read to me a lot and had me do a lot of little things that felt a lot like school. Eventually I moved from kindergarten to the formal Celestial school across the street.
I remember the teachers of the Celestial Sisterhood being extremely strict. More than once I got my hooves smacked with a ruler for not paying attention. I did horrible in classes and was behind all the time. In time I made friends that lasted with me the entire time we lived in the city. Mostly other ponies who had similar problems with school that I did.
In case you’ve never been to a big city like Coltcago, the buildings aren’t usually built with peaked roofs like in smaller towns and villages. They are flat with gutters on the sides that collect the water and guide it into the storm sewers.
My friends and I regularly would use a nearby mulberry tree to make our way onto a ladder that led to one of the roofs. And since all the roofs were close together...well you get the idea.
I remember one time we were on a roof that overlooked a street with shops and people walking back and forth on it. We were hanging our heads over the sides of a low block wall on the front of the building. The space behind the wall was littered with the leftovers of some long-gone gang of construction ponies. A brick here, an iron spike there, that sort of thing.
I picked up and iron spike to look at it.
“Drop it over the side!” one of my friends said. (In retrospect Tank wasn’t the brightest of ponies. His ego far outweighed the thin and wiry stature of his frame.) “Drop it! I dare you!”
“Umm...” I was undecided. I mean I knew enough that I could hurt somepony. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“C’mon! I double dare you!” Tank exclaimed, jumping up and down now. “Take a chance Chance!”
Okay, yeah, my parents named me Chance. It was the most popular pony name for years until recently. I’ve never been comfortable with the name really...where was I.
Tank was still waiting on my answer, hopping from one set of hooves to the other. “C’monnnnn!” he whined.
I don’t know what happened next really. I think Tank sat the steel bar on top of the edge of the building and when I turned I knocked it off. Or I might have purposefully knocked it off. To this day I’m not sure. Regardless it fell to the ground on the sidewalk with a loud clang! The ponies on the sidewalk looked up at us and one of them started yelling. “You could have hurt somepony badly!” the stallion said angrily. “You all just wait there while I call the guards!” he continued.
We of course weren’t going to wait for that to happen. We turned and galloped across multiple rooftops until we were far away.
I can laugh about the experience now but in hindsight it was the first time I really realized that my actions had serious consequences for others. It was the first time I realized that something I did could seriously hurt someone.
That didn’t sit too heavy on my mind though at that age of course. I was too focused on having fun and trying to understand the ponies and world around me.
About the middle of my third year at school we moved out to a suburb named Nailtown. It was kind of a mixed blessing because my sister and I got our own rooms finally but it meant I lost all my friends and had to make new ones.
I don’t make friends easily, nor let them go...
On top of all this my parents continued to fight a considerable amount. It wasn’t like an argument each night, maybe every other night. Still bad but not bad enough to be unlivable. (Though more than once I thought about running away.)
I did even more poorly in school than I’d done before. Each time I failed my mother told me it was okay but my father got angry. If you’ve ever heard the expression ‘Child of the crop’ you know how he reacted often. I learned really quickly not to make him angry.
There’s so much that happened when we lived here it’s hard to fit it all into a framework. This is true of my life all over. It’s all so...disjointed. Like everything is happening at once and I have to take myself and puff myself up to not be affected by it all. Kind of like how you have to turn up the light to burn away the fog. It gets more difficult to brighten that light as I get older.
The friends I made were good ones for the most part. A few were fair-weather but not the core group.
During school I was put into extra classes to deal with a lisp I’d developed but for the most part I did just as badly as I had done previously in school. I tried, I really did, but no matter what I couldn’t grasp the things I needed.
To top it all off, I had developed a hairless patch on the top of my head. The bullies started calling me “Hole In One”.
During one of the teasing sessions I just stood there unable to rebut any of their insults. Suddenly a filly about my age came up and shooed them all away.
“Don’t worry!” she said after they left. “I am missing hair too!” She pulled a knit cap off her head to reveal large empty spots as if she’d been shaved wrong. “Call me Patch.” she said cheerily.
I don’t know what it was about her but I immediately trusted her. Despite the insults and innuendo she and I started hanging out. One day I heard she was sick so I went to her house with some cookies for a gift.
She was in her bedroom. As I entered I was so surprised at how white it was. Like everything had been bleached and the only color left was the bright lack of it.
She explained that she was very sick but that I shouldn’t worry. We played games and talked and just existed as if the world outside was so much empty. In time she was tired so I went home.
Over the course of the next few months we met in that room and one day she explained to me that she might have to go away. It was a tough concept for me. But I think I understood because I was in love with her. Truly in love. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same way with anyone else in Equestria.
Then one day I showed up at the house and stood there on the wide flagstone. Her parents were stacking moving boxes on the front porch. The conversation still sits with me.
“Is Patch here?” I asked.
“No she’s not Chance.” her mother replied.
My mouth was not sure what to say next. I looked at the boxes. “...did she die?” I asked quietly. “Because she told me once that she might.”
Both of them suddenly had tears welling up in their eyes and for several long moments they didn’t speak. Grandma taught me to be patient sometimes so I said nothing.
Finally, Patch’s father spoke, “We are moving to Prance so she can get better treatment.”.
To this day I’m not sure if those words were lies or the truth. They felt false.
“Tell her I miss her.” I told them, my eyes welling up. “Tell her I love her.”
It was at that point her parents broke down and openly cried. I couldn’t confront this so I ran. I galloped most of the way home and sat in my room and cried.
This memory has stayed with me for all my life. And to this day I still think about her from time to time. I don’t even recall her real name, her cutie mark, or much else about her. The truly sad part is I never knew what happened to her. I never took the time to go find out and I don’t think I’ll ever do so. I think...I think I still love her. Insane and foolish of me, I know. But there it is.
Without Patch around the bullying intensified. I endured it because there was really nothing else I could do. I cried so much that it only increased the insults with “Crybaby!” and other similar things. I found some relief by hiding away.
The house that my parents purchased had a crawl space underneath it. It was to all appearances a basement that had been made of poured concrete but then filled back in with very tiny gravel. A grown pony couldn’t stand up in it. I couldn’t even fully stand up in it, but it was secluded, had plenty of room, and above all it was quiet.
It was perfect.
I can’t tell you how many times I hid down there. The opening in the floor was in my room so I could hide down there whenever I wanted.
So many times I hid down there with a bean bag and a lantern and read fantasy books. It was my escape, my release. It allowed me to recover from being forced to be around all the other ponies that insisted that I was the ‘weird’ one. It was blissfully silent of noise It was the one place I was able to just lose myself in my thoughts or a book.
I read so many stories back then. Stories of rockets! Stories of knights! Stories of magic! And not the everyday kind of magic that unicorns use but the spectacular kind that moved mountains and brought the stars to my hands.
In time I balanced a little bit and was able to spend more time outside of the “pit” as my family called it. (My sister hid down there with me as well from time to time but she was more an extrovert than I will ever be so it wasn’t often.)
Then something happened. The school I was attending got in a system of automated spell clusters of the same type my father worked on.
My father had already introduced me to them by taking me to his workshop once or twice. I was always mesmerized by how the spells he crafted created things that worked, things that moved, things that produced one number from the ones given it. I hated math but I loved this!
This was actually my second introduction to these clusters. When we were still living in Coltcago, after my parents got back together, my father brought one of the sub-clusters home to do some work on it. It wasn’t much, all bland and frankly a little ugly. But he taught me how to do some things with it. And I enjoyed every bit of it. It made sense. It was organized. It wasn’t like all the strange and fluctuating things I had to deal with where ponies were concerned. But he had to give it back when we moved out of the city. I didn’t see another cluster until I entered the middle grades.
I was hooked to say the least. Every spare moment I spent involved with those systems. The teachers tried to use it to motivate me at my other classes but often I ignored them until I couldn’t. I worked at bringing up my grades because I finally had something that I could wholly understand! I couldn’t let them take that away from me.
So I worked harder. I brought my grades up. I didn’t make any more friends than I already had, but I suddenly fit into the structure around me. People knew where I stood finally. They understood. they still teased me and insulted me and excluded me. But they accepted me.
And of course it had to all fall through. My parents decided to move from Nailville to another suburb further out called Lattice Lake.
When I found out we were moving I begged and pleaded that we find some solution so could at least finish out my 3rd year at the upper grades. I tried and tried to find a solution but time and time again the answer came up with a harsh bleakness. “I’m sorry but you can’t finish school if you don’t live in the area.”
I was crushed. I would be starting all over again. I would be losing all my friends again. And that’s exactly what happened.
It was pure hell of a different order...
Along Came A Spider - Chapter 2 - by RandomGreymane
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As expected it was more than a little problematic.
Here is was, thrown into a completely different environment. It was so confusing because it was at once some of the same dung I’d experienced but also different.
It was the same group of ponies...jocks, nerds, ponies with their snoots in the air, and all of them still with more bits than I’d see. I think I made three friends in that whole time. One of which died in a cart crash.
I was pretty alone. And it didn’t help that no matter what I did, nothing seemed to help. My grades slipped again but were just barely tolerable. I failed the Equestrian Constitution Test once and had to take a class to do it again. In the end I went an extra year of upper grades before graduating. In some ways that worked out - I had a year of half day schedules - but in most it set me back.
Once school was done it was time for me to look into university schooling. I was still interested in the crystal clusters and their components but there was no way I could afford anything more than the local community site. So I enrolled there. I paid my tuition by working selling cart parts and took as many classes on weekends and nights that I could.
I did make a life-long friend there who I still talk to today. However overall the experience was mixed. I had some instructors I couldn’t stand, and others that I wanted to teach all my classes. In the end I was able to get a simple certification in the components of the crystal structures. That was enough to land me a simple job building and repairing the smaller ones.
It was a sweet job for a long time. I worked long hours, traveled to different businesses, and learned things I would have never learned any other way. And, for a time, I was paid what I was worth and for how hard I worked.
Like many things in my life, that didn’t last.
The owner of the business became involved with the Stellarite Cult and very soon he was pushing his rhetoric onto myself and the others working for him. He changed the pay system from hourly to a different one so that we were paid less. He required us to attend Stellarite instruction. In the end I started believing in the Stellarite Way of doing things.
During all this, I met and wed my long-time marefriend. We even had our child while in the cult. We didn’t stay in it long after that. They didn’t pay us for our work really, and we almost lost everything we owned and all we held dear. Somewhere in the process we moved back in with my mother and father. We ended up giving all we earned to help support that house as my parents divorced and neither was working.
We started new jobs at different places and washed our hands of the cult. The fresh start was painful, but we started moving up again rather than down. I started a good job doing matrix support for a small fastener company, and my mare got a job working at an advertising firm.
We also learned that our foal had issues of the mind. She didn’t talk at all until she was much older and showed problems learning. Among many other things. The doctor bills mounted of course as we tried to find some way to help her.
In the end, the center could not hold. My mother announced that she was selling the house to my sister and moving.
We had no place to go. Well...this isn’t strictly true. My mare and our daughter had someplace to go. My mother-in-law stated that it would be okay for my spouse and our daughter to move in with them but not myself.
While we were planning for this, a friend of mine’s father had to move out to Californeigha to keep his sales job. His house was paid for, and he didn’t want to sell it, so he offered to let us rent/house-sit it while he was gone. (My friend was moving out there as well to pursue his long-time marefriend.)
This was Celestia Sent! We didn’t have to split up our family and it was a wonderful, and inexpensive, house to live in! And for a few years we were happy. I had moved on to a full manager’s position at another company and it paid very well. She had moved to a position in Purchasing at a book warehouse. We had enough money and we worked and paid off most of our bills.
In time, my friend’s relationship fell through and he moved back to the area. I saw how lost he was, so I offered to let him move back into his old room until he could get back on his feet. (I didn’t realize how bad a mistake this was at the time.) So we moved our stuff out of that room and he moved back in.
And that’s where another round of trouble started. Nothing we did was good enough for his parent’s house. We did things “wrong” in every manner. We ended up becoming silently subservient to him. To the point where we let the house maintenance slip because we just couldn’t take being told we were wrong any more.
After a time, and at least once incident where his parents confronted us about the state of the house, they informed us that they would be moving back in.
Wait...I’m missing an important memory here...
Daisy. I’m missing Daisy.
Daisy Rain was my cousin on my mother’s side. I was extremely close to her and another cousin named Dive. We used to get together after family gatherings to have coffee and talk for hours. Daisy and I would talk via spell-cluster for long hours and trade scroll messages regularly. We talked of everything from philosophy to magick and even family history. We talked all the time.
Then, one day, the phrase ‘She’s made her decision. She’s made her choice.’ came to me. It was like someone plucked a string inside me and it vibrated the message. Stranger still, it appeared in phrases in the plays I watched, in the papers, even in messages I received from others. It felt...bad...dark...ominous.
Now please understand that our family contains many gifts. Gifts of magick. Gifts of prophecy. Gifts...somehow I knew this one was related to someone in trouble.
I spent two days contacting people by dragon-scroll trying to find out where the trouble was. Two. Days. Not once did I think to contact Daisy.
Two Days later...I got a scroll from my mother. Daisy...Daisy had obtained a combat-magick scroll...and...in the basement of her duplex...placed it on her head and activated it. All that was left was a mark on the wall and a blood-soaked couch.
It was only then that I understood the purpose of the message. The universe had given me a chance to help her.
The universe had given me a golden opportunity to save her.
And I failed. I failed miserably. That still haunts me to this day. Intellectually I know that I likely couldn’t have stopped her. She’d have tried later, or found another way. But I was given the golden chance that so many others weren’t. And I blew it.
Dive and I don’t speak any more.
Her death was a turning point of sorts in my life. I tried to do more with less. But I failed at that as well.
I don’t think I’ve ever truly gotten over her passing. The tears are still there to cry even though I let them out afterwords. They probably will always still be there until I too pass into the arms of the Guardian of Dreams.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be whole again. At least that’s what I tell myself when I reach out mentally and she’s not there. She taught me so much about how my life and our family gifts work. I’ll always miss her.
Moving on...
My friend’s father informed us that, thanks to those flank-heads in the Equestrian Council who caused the value of the bit to tank, he had been released from his position and would be moving back soon.
My mare and I were looking for our own place, and this only accelerated the process. We purchased a small red and black single-story house and promptly moved in. (A note to perhaps help somepony in the same position - don’t ever overpay for a house, and get RID of things BEFORE you move. Ask me how I know.)
And just like that, once again, we were happy for a time. The house gave us a place that was truly ours and we were able to get rid of a couple of bills with the money made in the deal. We moved in.
And then I became unemployed myself a year or so later.
Fortunately we were able to pull out money from our retirement and pay off our remaining debts that were not involved in the mortgage of the house. The unemployment funds we received via the Celestia Employment Agency kept us afloat. Fortunately, my spouse remained employed during all this.
When you have time to think, you learn. It’s unavoidable. I learned several things while I was unemployed.
I learned I could be artistically creative. I learned that I was something worthwhile to everypony but an employer looking for someone to hire. I learned more about how my mind worked. And...I learned that I had been abused earlier in life. Or at least learned that those fleeting moments of pain and terror that I’d been having since childhood weren’t “just me”.
It was the same sort of scandals that you read in the papers. Young colt becomes an acolyte of The Church Of The Sun Princess, young colt gets threatened with being sent to Tartarus, young colt is taken into a private room and...well...you know. Those memories, what was left of them, were very old. From when I was young and living in Nailville.
Doctor Whooves once said “You can always tell the shape of something that’s missing by the hole it left.”, and that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with here. I can recall the abuse of friends. I can recall the warnings from them about the priests. I can even remember walking in on a colt crouched on the floor of a tiny room in the back of the church. Another of the colts hustled me out before I asked too many questions. There was even one very young colt who killed himself by setting fire to his home and locking his bedroom door.
The shape of the hole is quite clear. And so are the ripples of how it has affected me through the years. It’s the reason I hate cream sauces. The reason I can’t eat eggs that are rubbery when I had no problem with them as a child - they gag my throat and an image flashes in my mind in an instant. An obscene image, along with a particular smell. It’s the reason my reactions in the privacy of our bedroom are so strange, and always have been.
Yet another thing I’ll never be free of. I don’t have the insurance nor the bits to see someone about the memories.
In time, after some temporary jobs, I found a position with another company and worked my flank off the moment I set hoof through the door.
And I haven’t stopped since.
I work at least 50+ hours a week. For a while I was in the overnight rotation for emergency scroll alerts for the cluster networks.
Eventually I moved into assigning out those scrolls instead of handling. It’s not nearly the bits I was getting before I was originally laid off, but it’s enough if we spend it carefully. Sometimes we don’t. Heck, a lot of time we don’t.
The long hours at all my jobs, the bad eating, the lack of exercise, the time I was unemployed, they’ve all taken their toll. My body is now damaged enough that I can’t eat certain things, have to take medicine every day, and have pain in my hind legs every night when I try and fall asleep. Not to mention the failed operation that took away my ability to be intimate. *cough*
And....I’m going blind now. The failure in my body, has damaged by eyes so much that they bleed inside. It hasn’t caused a loss of vision - just blurriness for now - but it’s progressive. And there is no cure. Even the best spells only temporarily alleviate the situation.
I’ve come to terms with it. In a few years I’ll likely be blind. That means I’ll be unable to work and have to go on Lunar Disability.
So...in the meantime...I’m trying to get everything handed over to my loving mare before things get out of hoof. We still have a lot of debts, but we’re working to get rid of them. I don’t want her to have to deal with those as well as the current load.
And that’s where we stand now. I’m going blind. We are in debt. We never seem to have enough.
This doesn’t feel fair. But the universe isn’t fair. And others have it far worse than we do. I guess the best I can do it try and make sure I’m not a burden to those around me until the time comes for me to move on.
I often feel like I did something to deserve this. And perhaps, in another life, I have. But I can’t think of anything this time around that would fit the bill.
This is Chance, signing off. Thanks for listening and Luna Bless You.
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boycolt that was...