Once, I was happy being sane. I had free cable, slacker friends, no girlfriend, and a shitty job doing customer support, but I guess I was happy.

That all changed one day when I went to a costume party dressed up as the psychoanalytic semiotician Jacques Lacan.

---

I rubbed my shoe over the algebraic diagram I had drawn in the dirt with a stick. “Let me begin again,” I said to the three small horses before me. “These--how do you say, ‘cutie marks’? A mark, you understand, is a signifier, which points to the signified. The thing signified is your identity as constructed through the mirror of The Other.”

“The Other?” the white one gasped, looking around in fright.

“Your parents, your friends, the entire symbolic structure of your society, is the Other.” I stabbed the stick into the ground, making a dot, then drew an ‘O’ next to it. “It is through your perceptions of the apparent wholeness of the Other that you conceptualize of yourself as a unified ego.” I drew a line leading out to the left of it, and punctuated its terminus with another dot.

“I already told you, I’m not an eagle,” the orange one grumbled.

“The ego,” I continued, “is a fiction, an imagined wholeness.” I draw a third line, up and to the right, terminating above the first point. “It fixates itself on one Other in particular, the Big Other, the objet petit ‘a’.” I drew a lowercase ‘o’ next to the third point.

“Enough lines,” the yellow one said. “Where’s this mirror we gotta look through?” It peered down at my diagram. “It’s by this big ‘O’, right?” It lifted its head and scanned the trees around us, as if expecting to see a large capital ‘O’ in their midst.

“No, no, no!” I said. “You must find your Big Other.”

“I think he’s in the south orchard,” it said.

“Your Big Other, your master signifier,” I continued, and drew a fourth line out to the left of the third point. “Once you see it is nothing but your own narcissistic projections misrecognized as fullness, you will find the emptiness of unbeing in your subjective destitution.” I drew an S at the final point.

The three tiny equines clustered around my diagram and snuffled at it. It was incomplete, but one can pour only so much water into a cracked cup. I waited for the lesson to sink in.

The white one raised its head. “The stained-glass window way up on the side of City Hall looks kind of like a big ‘O’!” it exclaimed. There was a rumbling and a cloud of dust, and when it cleared, I saw them running away in the distance.

“Excuse me,” a voice called. I turned, and that was when I saw her. My Big Other. My fundamental fantasy, in the flesh. Horseflesh, as it turned out.

---

When I had opened the front door that day, Josh had been standing there wearing a red wig and a string of loaves of Wonder Bread around his neck. His scratched-up old Scion idled in the driveway. The ugly cube kind, not the sportscar kind.

“Dude!” he said, staring at me. He puckered one side of his mouth like he does when he’s trying to be funny. “It’s a best-costume party, not a biggest-nerd party. Who are you, Orville Redenbacher?”

Just for that, I decided I wasn’t going to ask him what his costume was. “We’ll see who’s laughing when the women flock around me to be psychoanalyzed,” I said as I walked out to the car. I held out one arm of my suit. “That’s real tweed, you know.”

He turned to me once we were sitting in his car. “I’m the ginger bread man! Get it?”

“Of course I got it.” It was kinda funny, but I kept a straight face. “One final touch,” I said, and reached into my suit jacket’s front left pocket. The jacket and white band-collar shirt had been easy to find in a local thrift shop. The bow-tie and grey shock wig I got off ebay. What made the costume come together, though, were the glasses. Old-school wire-rims, somewhere between Freud and John Lennon.

Weirdly, I’d gotten them first. Some old guy in DuPont Circle had been selling bits of costumes off a card table, mostly wigs and capes and cheap-looking superhero crap. I saw these glasses lying on the table and thought they were his, but he was already wearing glasses. He saw me looking, smiled, and moved one arm towards them, palm-up, inviting me to try them on.

I thought they looked goofy, but I picked them up anyway, and when I put them on, I felt a tingling in my head, and swear I heard a voice whisper, “Jacques Lacan.” Which was weird, since I wasn’t aware that I’d ever heard of the guy. But I guess I must have heard about him on the Discovery Channel or something, because when I looked him up on my phone there was a Wikipedia page about him. No movies, though.

So that was creepy. But the old guy only wanted, like, three bucks for them, so I figured, why not?

This time, though, when I put them on, I got more than a tingling. There was a bright light, and a high-pitched whining, and I grabbed my head and Josh was screaming and I was screaming and suddenly I was lying face-up in a clearing in a forest, looking at bits of blue sky between the branches far above me.

I sat up, rubbed my head, and tried to say, “What the HOLY HELL just happened?” What came out was, “What sliding signifiers so radically decentered my subjectivity?”

---

That was more-or-less how I had found myself in a forest, instructing three very small horses in semiotic psychoanalysis. Which takes us back to the moment when I met her.

There was no shock of attraction. I didn’t know she was a “her” then. I could only guess she was an adult. Her coat was a pale lavender. I still don’t know what that signifies. A spiral phallus protruded from her head.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you the… person… who told Miss Cheerilee—let me see if I’ve got this straight—that she had to ‘tell Travis her fondest fantasy’?”

“Traverse her fundamental fantasy,” I corrected.

“I see. And you told Big Macintosh that he had to be, um…” She blushed. “Castrated?”

“Symbolically.”

“Did you specify that?”

“I thought it was implicit,” I said.

“I see. Well, Mister, um...”

“Lacan,” I said, and offered her a hand, which she merely sniffed at. I pulled it back. “But you may call me Doctor Lacan.”

“Twilight Sparkle. Princess Twilight Sparkle. Charmed. Doctor Lacan, I’d like you to come to my castle and tell me about these… treatments of yours.”

“A castle! A metaphor that spontaneously arises in obsessional neurosis to designate its mechanisms of inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement, with a keep at the center, a fortified redoubt that signifies the impenetrable id. This grows more and more interesting. Lead the way, Twilight Sparkle.”

She began leading me out of the forest where I had come to visit my most-recent patients. Her steps slowed, until finally she stopped, and asked, “You really think I have obsessional neurosis?”

“Undoubtedly,” I said. “I have seen many cases.”

She sighed, then resumed walking.

“In fact,” I went on, “I am afraid that is the least of your problems. You have separated yourself from the accepted discourse.”

“There’s nothing wrong with reading books!” she exclaimed, an edge of panic in her voice.

“This identity you have constructed for yourself fits nowhere in the symbolic structure of modern society.” I gestured at her wings, her hooves.

She stopped again, and turned her head toward me. I saw tears in her ridiculously large eyes.

“Oh, doctor!” she said. “You’re so right!”

I shook my head sadly. “Many people here have fallen into psychosis,” I told her. “It is a most unusual case. They need help. No doubt that is why they see me as Jacques Lacan, the world’s greatest psychoanalyst.”

“Can you help me?” she cried.

I stroked my chin. “With patience, dedication, and courage… possibly.”

She rose up and I thought she was going to trample me, but she threw her front legs around my shoulders and cried grateful tears. I said comforting words, and began thinking of possible titles for the International Psychoanalytic Association talk I would undoubtedly give about this case.

---

The caste was unexpectedly ugly, a sign that she was already aware on some level of her neurosis. Probably my presence was already therapeutic.

We sat on the edge of a large map table, in a cavernous room that bounced echoes back at us when we spoke. I could not discern how she was able to sit.

“The first problem,” I told her, “is that you aren’t married.”

“That’s… not the solution to everything, you know,” she said.

“I don’t mean for you. I mean for these other people. They are all suffering from psychosis.”

“Hey! You don’t know them like I do.”

Just then, a pink horse zipped into the room using some non-obvious method of locomotion. “Twilight-I-have-to-hide-from-my-shadow Gummy-will-finish-the-decorating!” She dropped what looked like a toy alligator on the table and zipped back out.

We both looked at the alligator. It blinked.

After a pause, I continued. “Their psychosis is, I’m afraid, your fault.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I knew it.” She stood up and began pacing around the room. “Of course it’s my fault. I’m their princess.” The hair in her mane spontaneously tangled itself in a way that seemed iconographic of mental derangement.

“Correct,” I said. “As their princess, you are their mother figure in this social hierarchy. They will feel an Oedipal attraction to you. You must have a bond to a masculine figure who will intervene and symbolically castrate them, to free them from this forbidden Oedipal love so that they can pursue their own desires.”

She thought that over for a while. “I’m not sure that makes any sense.”

“Madame,” I said in my sternest voice, “I am a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure.”

“You are?”

I nodded.

“That’s very impressive. But why don’t we look for another solution first, anyway?”

“There is no other solution,” I said. “You have conceived of yourself as a purple winged unicorn. Without a masculine figure to symbolically castrate your citizens, many of them have likewise conceived of themselves as brightly-colored equines, to provide you with the equine phallus they believe you desire.”

Her cheeks reddened. “Um… not that I have anything against phalluses… phalli? But… what exactly is the problem here?”

I was growing impatient with the stupidity of these people. I strode to the window, threw open the casement, and gestured out at the oddly-colored horses trotting by beyond. “These people think they are horses!”

“Ponies,” she corrected. “That’s because they are ponies.”

“Within this discourse, they are,” I agreed. “But think: Is it not suspicious that the people who call you princess, and they alone, appear to be ponies?”

“No… everypony here is a pony. I mean, everypony who isn’t a zebra or a cow or, well, look, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. What else would they be?”

I looked into her honest face, and then it hit me. I sat down heavily in a chair and threw one hand to my forehead.

“I,” I said, “I am the delusional one.”

“I think that makes more sense,” she said encouragingly. She patted me on my back. “Sorry about that.”

“In order to maintain my own identity as a man, I have had to restructure my internal discourse so radically that the distortion causes everyone else to appear to me as ponies.” I shook my head. “I must be a monster.”

She shook her head slowly. “We’re really ponies. Have been as long as I remember.” She held up one hoof and waved it in front of my face. “See?”

I looked up at her. Her crown glinted in the light of the candelabra.

“I see,” I said. Then, “I see!”

“Oh, thank goodness!”

I leapt to my feet. “I have conceived of you as a princess, because you are my princess! You are my objet petit ‘a’!

“Um. Thanks?”

“There is only one way to cure me.”

“Oooo-kay…”

“We must make love.” I strode toward her.

“EEEEK!” She sprang back from me. The frazzles in her hair doubled. I waited for her to catch her breath.

“You seem like a nice, whatever you are, Doctor,” she said, “but I don’t…”

“You don’t love me as I wish to be loved, you are not the perfection whose image I see. Yes! I know!” I took a step closer. “But only on the verge of possessing you can I comprehend your flaws. The slight coating of grease in your mane, the smell of damp horse, the nauseating sight of the pores in your face seen up close.”

“That’s… not very romantic.” We were circling the table, her walking backwards and I following her.

“So I will reject you in disgust! And in so doing, I will free myself of you!”

“Or you could just leave,” she suggested. “The door’s open.”

“I am the doctor here!” I shouted at her.

She stumbled over a throne someone had left pulled out—why were there so many thrones?—and fell to the ground before me. I bent toward her, but before I drew near she thrust a leg out to ward me off, and it struck me right between the eyes.

There was a crack like a lightning strike, and a flash. I found myself sitting in Josh’s car. The air smelled like ozone. The broken glasses fell from my face in two pieces.

“Dude,” Josh said. His face was white. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said. “I am not okay.” I picked up the broken glasses and put them back in my pocket. “I don’t want to go to this party.”

“Okay.” We sat in the car for a few moments.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I opened the door and got out. Then I leaned back down to look at Josh. “A purple pegacorn princess,” I said, and shut the door.

I still have my free cable, my slacker friends, no girlfriend, and a shitty job doing customer support. But things have changed. I slide from one day into the next, numb with helplessness.

I have seen the face of my unattainable desire. I can pursue nothing else until I can attain and despise her. This is a scientific fact.

And sometimes I wonder: What if I didn’t despise her?

Forgive me, Lacan.

I super-glued the glasses back together. They do nothing.

Evenings I pore over the Écrits and think of my purple pony princess, my my fundamental fantasy, my master signifier, my objet petit a. I re-read The Four Fundamental Concepts, thinking of her, searching for clues as to how to drive myself mad once more.