I watched her struggle.

I didn't witness her fall, nor the sequence of events that had led to it. When I turned around, she was just lying there. I could barely make out the color of her coat through the dim light; she was pale yellow, with an orange mane. She was surrounded by ponies on all sides. One mare, sky blue, sat across her side, speaking softly into her ear. A brown pegasus stallion held her hoof. Two more ponies lay before her on the ground, making eye contact and murmuring to her every so often.

Around us, the festivities raged on. One moment I had been enjoying Countess Coloratura's--or, I supposed, Rara's--performance. The next, I became absorbed by this performance of a different nature. Two unicorns kept their horns bright so everypony could see what was happening on the ground, and no one would be trampled. What had happened to her? I wondered. Had she taken ill? Grown faint from the heat of all the bodies packed into such a small space? Perhaps she had taken one too many a glass of cider from the Apple-run charity stand at the back of the crowd.

But who were all these ponies, anyway? I couldn't see most of their Cutie Marks and none of the coat colors lined up, but they could easily be related by marriage rather than blood. The light shifted, and I caught a glimpse of the yellow mare's face. She looked younger than I had thought at first. Probably too young to have by now found another pony to marry, really. Perhaps they were all friends? But there again age bemused me. The sky blue mare looked to be older than myself. The brown pegasus was very nearly my age. Some of the others were roughly the mare's age, but some were younger still. Indeed, as I searched the faces of the ponies in the now-sizable crowd surrounding the mare, I continued to find myself incapable of uncovering any sort of link between them that might allow me to satisfactorily conclude their collective relation to this mare who lay on the ground, unmoving, before me.

Distracted momentarily from my musings by a rise in the music behind me, I briefly considered how Rara fit into all of this. She seemed like a nice enough pony. And surely, from her vantage point behind her piano, she must have been able to see the relatively impressive hole in the crowd that had formed to allow the yellow mare and the ponies attending her space to breathe. So it struck me as strange heartlessness that she might allow the concert to continue while this mare lay stricken on the ground.

But, perhaps the stage lights were too bright for her to see out into the audience with enough detail to notice the goings-on. Perhaps, if indeed she had noticed the gap, she figured it was merely a natural peculiarity of crowd dynamics. Perhaps she was unable to see the prone form of the mare as I could.

It felt as though years had passed since I had first turned myself away from the music to see what was going on behind me--even though I was relatively sure that we were still hearing the same song. In the time I had been contemplating Rara, several volunteers with the festival had arrived. They began helping the mare to her hooves. The volunteers walked her out of the crowd with a leg each around two mares. Nopony followed the trio.

As I turned back to watch Rara finish her song, I was struck once more by the sheer unreality of the events that had unfolded. A group of ponies that had seemed to know so well what they were doing--and yet, without obviously connection and lacking the compulsion to follow the mare into the crowd as she was carried by the volunteers. Myself, looking on. Gazing without comprehension as the crisis in miniature went unnoticed by ponies only a few yards from it, as it occurred during a love song. Letting the memory pass like the mare passed into the crowd, disappearing from view, and leaving in my life an outline shaped like a novel full of questions. Who was she? What had happened? How did those around her know how to help?

And why did I do nothing but watch?