Monologue #345

when you walked away

I shaved the sides of my head,

dyed what was left

cried for all the places you’d never touch me again

cried the windstorm

Monologue #359

James, roll him over.

Get up, you do not get to hide from this. Regret does not make it okay that you kissed the wrong girl. We’ve been in this dust-covered spare room for four hours now keeping you from vomiting into your own mouth while you scream obscenities in your sleep. We are exhausted. We are sweaty and my shirt still reeks of smoke from the club where I didn’t even get to buy a drink before we had to leave because Kay was crying. James has at least three bruises from catching you when you started throwing yourself backwards down the stairs. We are every kind of battered from your bad decisions.

The bed is no longer an option. Ignoring last night doesn’t make it any less real for the rest of us who do remember it and who had to keep you from shoving your hands down our pants. Now you are going to drink this coffee, take a shower, throw on sunglasses and meet us down the street where the girls are having breakfast. And you are going to clear this up before we all lose them.

Monologue #78

The only fighting I was taught was silence. You fight by withholding, I mean with hips that snag on counter-tops, I mean with secrets licked into the ears of whoever is closest, I mean with daring someone to go to sleep without you. Taught by generations of French women who folded their mouths up into tiny red boxes of resentment and built you mad just like them, all the words for hurt deep in the pockets of their aprons.

And then she pushed me down on the purple hot asphalt behind the school. She yelled in my face and her spit caught my ear.

I left warm with sweat and dirtied knees and I loved her like paws on your chest when you get home.

I was never allowed to be brutal and bloody until her hands found my wrists. Now I looked like getting up and getting dressed just to wrap my hands and go again.

As long as I have something worth fighting for.

Monologue #670

The bus at 3 in the morning, tucked into myself. I’m using two sweaters as a pillow and holding my feet against the armrest, sleep coiled like a spring. Unconscious and absolutely filled with potential energy. Lauren mimics my pose in the seats across the aisle. I suppose I mimic her, copied her limbs because I couldn’t sleep sitting up anymore. I have my passport in a money-belt against my womb – sweaty – and my strawberry purse around my neck and tucked beneath me. I wake up, tousled, as the bus once again seems to rise in the air and drop all of its bolts, just to reattach and drop onto the road again. We roaches of the dark settle back into our transient nests. I look at Lauren in the sci-fi blue light of the aisleway between us. How odd to find such comfort in someone practically a stranger. We arrive at 5 am and the weather is perfect to walk home in – the sky a fading cobalt, like tired roof tiles in Budapest. We walk empty streets with backpacks full of creased maps holding us to the cobblestones. A Sunday morning on the precipice of day. In the shower I find the pinch of blisters on my feet, tucked against tough skin gone soft in the three months of shoewear. My soles ache for the dirt of summer, to be cracked and raw and strong. Healed through hardness.

Monologue #498

I am the most scared person I know. Within three minutes of walking into this room, I knew how many of you – statistically – were carrying a gun and how many of you were likely to fire it at me and the middle name of the man who built this stage and the name of the son of the woman who was hired expressly to walk me from that staircase at the edge of the stage to the car where the only driver I will ever get in a car with sits, waiting to take me to the next stage.

For years being scared was what I did with my day, and it got to the point where it took so much of my energy that I could do nothing but lay in bed and sit at my desk and then go back to my bed. My mom brought me food three times a day – always the same sandwich on a small white plate and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. I did this from age 23 to 27. And then she died. And I only knew because my food didn’t show up. So I called out for her and she didn’t answer and my fear went into overdrive, making me sweat and I started to feel nauseous and I cracked open my door and stood there staring through the crack of light at my childhood home calling for my mom and my lunch. I hadn’t left my room when I called the police.

I am always scared. I sweat through every shirt I wear. I know every outcome of every step I take, and I am learning to take them anyway. There is something about being scared that is similar to the anticipation before Christmas or your birthday or prom. It is that before-feeling that will always be better than the actual day. And it is the same with my fear. The pain of being scared of something will always be worse than the pain of any of the things I am imagining.

The fear is worse than the thing itself.

If that light slipped from the loop there and then the metal bent just right and it came down and knocked me out cold, I would get over it.

So I get over the fear.

Monologue #163

Humans adapt. That’s what we do. And when you’re removed from everything you’re comfortable with and thrown into a situation for a month where nothing is known to you, your adaptability goes into hyper drive. Your appetite slows down, you’re less nervous around new people, and you form the type of bonds that are usually only seen in family settings. You forge a family. Because if you’re going to survive, you’re going to need friends to hold you up and to hide behind. You’re going to need a family, of sorts.

So you do that. You find your family and you cry to them and tell them things you can’t even tell yourself but then they’re gone. Or you’re gone. Well you’re all gone and you’re back to where you’re supposed to be comfortable. But you don’t quite fit anymore. Now you’re too big for the space you used to take up here. And you can’t explain it to anyone cause you’re afraid they’ll shrink you down again, so you talk to your forged family in texts and messages to what might as well be a different country, and they continue to be your mirror.

In them you are as big as the sun.

But it starts to get to you. Because you’re talking to them but you can’t picture them. You can’t imagine their lives. You know how her body feels like someone else’s because it grew too damn fast, but not what her school looks like. You know where he wants to be in fifty years, but couldn’t find his hometown on a map because you were too busy holding his hand and playing cards to ask him where he stood before it was next to you. You don’t know who they talk to when they wake up in the morning or where they buy their groceries, but you know the things they will never do and what they would give up everything for. And you know that this is better, that it’s what matters in the end, but you are not at the end. That is an end where you are all together – an impossible end. And so you stop telling them everything, and they move farther and farther away because life has magnets at every pole.

You lose your family, and you start to shrink again.