smoke

The stage is dark and empty. Jeremy, Rebecca, and Will stand in a line upstage of Bernard and Ann-Marie, with even spaces between them of about an arm�s length. Jeremy is at stage right, Rebecca in the center, and Will at stage left. Rebecca and Will are holding hands with arms spread slightly to accommodate the space. Bernard and Ann-Marie stand downstage of the others, next to one another, but not directly in front of the other characters so that each character can be clearly seen by the audience. Both of them keep their faces toward the back wall of the theater. None of the characters look directly at each other or the audience when speaking, and should act as though each line is internal, with minimal to no movement. A spotlight is shone and left on each character upon speaking, dimming when the line is finished but left on.

Rebecca (turning head to Will, but looking down toward the floor rather than at his face): I love you.

Will (turning head to Rebecca, also looking down): I love you.

Jeremy (looking toward Ann-Marie): I am not in love with you. But I do love you.

There is a pause. When Ann-Marie begins to speak, the spotlight on her is dim, and builds to the same intensity as the others only when she delivers her final line in the play. She alone is permitted to look at the audience when speaking.

Ann-Marie (to the audience): I used to rub salt in my wounds. I remember watching straight and stone faced as the knife would saw through my skin. Once was never enough. It had to be done hard, and back and forth, and again and again and again until the pain would finally roll in, sharp as dawn air, and the blood would leak out with each little drip drip drip until it cooled and hardened like magma. Then I would spit in my hand and pour salt into my palm until I made a filthy paste that burned even my unblemished skin, which I then took and scrubbed my cuts and seared myself like fire. The smoke was invisible, but I could feel it rising from the raging fire on my arms that stabbed and hurt and healed. I felt like I was letting the devil out. It�s all we ever wanted, just to let the devil out. The devil that burns our hearts up with pain and rage and desire. Let the smoke out. Breathe in. Breathe out. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and the smoke, it overtakes me.

Another pause.

Bernard (facing the back wall and tilting his head slightly upwards): Can you love me?

The spotlights should now be shone with equal intensity on every character and then begin to fade a few moments after Ann-Marie speaks. The curtain is to be drawn and closed at the same time as the theater is finally left in darkness.

Ann-Marie: Do you love me?

my life

so this is my life as of now.

i work at logan's. mornings and whenever i feel like working a double. currently work is all that i do.

my roommate went psycho on me saturday morning after a long night of partying so i had to move back in with my parents. i need a new roommate and i'd prefer someone i knew. nick introduced me a while back to this girl named christina who had some roommate issues. she works at sal and mookie's and has really curly hair. i asked him to get ahold of her for me but i haven't been able to get that contact yet.

i need a new apartment.

my psycho ex roommate/friend has been telling lies about me to everyone that we know. so the kid and will and melissa may or may not think i'm crazy. but i'm trying to convince them that it is in fact he who is crazy. mr. psycho also says i made up the whole thing as some twisted way of getting back with the kid. but that would be ridiculous and counterproductive. if you know the person to whom i am referring, i warn you now to stay far far away.

living with my parents again sucks. but i don't think i can afford a new place on my own. if you're reading this and you need a new place to live holler at me.

i owe everyone money.

i need a slutty halloween costume.

i'm bored.

i watch too much espn.

mainly though, i just want to have a new apartment...

a lack of color

Everything that I used to do, to be, I now go through without feeling. The drugs, the drinks, the sex. Even the music. Go to work. Go home. Sleep. And everything I see, everything I do, I look upon with a gray sadness and know to myself, no, I do not love you. My dearest friends, my family, my life...no, I do not love you...I do not love you...I do not love you...

I look at my life and I pity myself. You drunk, you drug-addled whore. You brokenhearted wretch. You miserable fool. And for what, for what? What did I do to cause my life to be so meaningless? So lacking in anything resembling love or joy that its only worth is being worthless? Love is happiness, love is beauty, love is the most magnificent of the illusions. But pain is the truth. And I...I seem to exist solely for the purpose of drawing in and breathing out the truth. I am so unhappy, and will forever be this way, because I insist upon living and demanding and drawing out the truth. No, I do not love you. I do not love you. I do not love you. The only truth that there is.

And so I sit here and I pull my necklace and I pull my hair and I bite my fingers and I scratch my hands and I cut my arms. If you rub scrub salt over blood it bubbles a little bit. Did you know that? Did you know that you can pull five hairs at a time out of your head and won't feel any pain? Did you know that you can gnaw the skin off your fingers without feeling anything? When I was little I used to take needles and jab them through the thick-skinned parts of my hands to scare my friends. It doesn't hurt. But everything else does.

All of the questions I have ever asked have been answered, and answered truthfully. I do not love you. I do not love you. But the one question, the one that matters, the one that drives at me and bites me and burns me and plagues me, the most important question...why is it like this?

I don't know.

I love nothing anymore. I will never fall in love again.

And it makes me sad, to know that things must always be this way. To know that my life will forever be gray. Colorless. To know that I only exist in the negative space.

Without love, nothing else remains.

I do not love you.

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

sadnesses

These things make me sad.


The sadness of being drunk.
The sadness of being sober.
The sadness of not feeling sad.
The sadness of sex.
The sadness of knowing the truth.
The sadness of believing a lie.
The sadness of pride.
The sadness of humiliation.
The sadness of feeling righteous.
The sadness of being depraved.
The sadness of work.
The sadness of passion.
The sadness of being passionless.
Gray sadness.
Anger sadness.
The sadness of knowing the future.
The sadness of knowing the past.
The sadness of remembering.
Friendship sadness.
The sadness of being alone.
The sadness of being surrounded.
The sadness of being lonely.
The sadness of beauty.
The sadness of unbeauty.
The sadness of being lovely.
The sadness of being unlovely.
The sadness of music.
The sadness of sleep.
The sadness of being awake.
Dream sadness.
The sadness of not being in love.
The sadness of being in love.
The sadness of loving nothing.
The sadness of loving everything.

where the heart is

let me tell you about a place called home.

home is the only place in the world where you can be without having to be anything at all. home is the place where you are loved and can have your love accepted in return. home is the place where you belong. home is a safe place. home is where you go when you have nowhere else to go. home is where you are wanted. home is where you feel whole. home is beautiful and lovely and completely imaginary. home is where the heart is. where the heart belongs. there is no place like home. there is no place like home. because home does not exist. home is a fantasy.

i sometimes think i have finally found a home, somewhere i belong, somewhere that won't cause me pain. i am so happy when i am there. i start to grow roots again. i start to believe in hope again. but then i am dug up, and uprooted, and thrown away, and it is always the same every single time. i am in so much pain i can't even begin to describe it. i can't even fathom it myself. even my broken hand can't distract me from it. to have to hear, over and over and over again, "i do not want you here. why won't you leave?" from the mouths of the place i once thought of as home, from the place where i was happy. to know that once again i am rootless, drifting aimlessly with nowhere to go. to know that i truly belong nowhere on this earth. i do not want you here. we do not want you here. a lost sheep, a kicked dog. i am more animal than man. the pain is more than i can bear. to be left with nothing yet again. to have my things packed for me yet again and told to leave the one place i finally thought i had found to belong. it is true. i don't belong here. i am always searching, searching for someplace to fill up the aching pit that eats away at my ever-shrinking heart, somewhere i belong, but always my searches are fruitless or the fruit they yield is poisoned. i do not know where my heart is. it is at home and home is lost to me forever. they do not want me here. and it is becoming again that i do not want to be here. i do not belong here. i do not belong anywhere. there so no such thing as a home for me to return to when everything goes wrong. i have no home. i do not belong. i do not fit anywhere on this planet. always searching and reaping nothing but pain again and again. i do not want you here. i do not want you. i do not want you.

stray dog, starving mongrel. feeding out of garbage cans to gain some kind of sustenance to last the day. eating whatever pill comes across my path to last the day. anything, anything at all as long as the pain will go away for enough time that i can fantasize being at home. that i can pretend i belong. that i can believe in the illusion of happiness. none of it is real. it will never be real to me. you do not want me. i do not want me. i belong nowhere and there is nothing i can do. broken hand, broken heart, broken dream. dream of being alive. i do not dream anymore. i do not see signs. i have nothing to make me believe that there is any reason to hope. home was all i wanted but now i understand it will never exist for me. you do not want me here. you do not want me. i do not belong. i am so tired of searching.

got my heart broken again. he dumped me and packed my shit. why does it always have to happen this way

---

I wrote this a month ago. And it's still god damn right

Never go searching for something better, because there is nothing out there. Nothing will ever make you any happier than you already are. Nobody loves you any more than you think they do. Plenty of them love you less. Everything is less than you hoped and exactly what you expected. Don't go through life thinking someone is going to save you. There aren't angels out there anymore. Knock and it shall not be opened unto you. Allelu, allelua.

unlovely

“You don’t care. You don’t love me anyway.”
“I do love you. I’m not in love with you, but I do love you, as a friend. You are a good friend. So you can’t say you’re unloveable because I do love you. I’m just not in love with you.”
“But it isn’t the same. Don’t you understand? Unlovely, and unbeautiful.”


So we sit in silence and I think of all the things you have said, the way you turn away from me in your frustration, the way you told me that if you won the lotto you’d go back and ask her to marry you, the way I told you I wouldn’t be at your wedding to another girl, and then regretted it when you turned your back to me again. You wonder why I am unlovely? Look at the way I love. It is an angry love, a love crawling and struggling and raging like a beast inside my chest, and it is the sadness of love without release that I cannot tell you, that I can never tell you, because I forced you to admit that you didn’t love me back. Because I cannot be happy and honest at the same time. Why couldn’t I have stayed silent, and nourished myself on the fantasy? Instead now I starve on the cold and rocky truth. I cannot seem to allow anything to be imaginary. I had to make you tell me that you don’t love me, and then ask you who you do love. I had to make it so that all the times you snuck the words in and stuck your tongue out at me mean nothing. I had to make it so that I could no longer pretend that you really did love me, that it was only a secret, that you couldn’t reveal it in any other way but to stick out your tongue or carelessly say “Love you,” as you’re closing the door to my car and I cannot respond.


So because I know for certain that you don’t love me, the pain that has been hiding now becomes too close and too strong to bear. The joy and laughter I have allowed myself during the charade now subsides to the tears and fury of the truth. You say, “I will still talk to you, and care about you. I do care about you.” But you don’t see that it is sadder that way, that you cannot build up another façade once you have broken the first and last one down and expect it to beautifully deceive the way it once did. I know you do not love me, and that that is the truth, and that any other lie to be given in place of the pain is just a lie, and that the fantasy will not bring me so much happiness anymore because I know in my mind and my heart the truth of my unloveliness and your unloving.


So when I feel the pain well up and swell inside my throat and stop my breath and burn my insides, I turn to you, and touch you, and remind myself that the fantasy can last as long as I am still here with you, and as long as you do not yet want to leave me behind. I touch your face and your belly and you begin to stir, and I see myself in the reflecting pool of your eyes, see myself as I will be, see myself as I will be if I hold on to this not-love, see myself crying as you walk up the aisle and out the door. See myself as I am, unlovely, and see things as they are, unbeautiful. So I touch you, and I think and I say, “Fuck me,” so that I can forget that you do not love me, “and then fuck me again,” so that I can pretend that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.


“Who do you miss more than anyone else in the world?”
“My sister.”


And you don’t understand that I love you the more for it, that I love you because you love other people, so I suck in my smoke and my tears and touch you again and say again fuck me, and when your arms wrap around me and you tug at my hair like a dog and you cry softly in the darkness I can pretend that yes, those cries are for me, yes, it is because you love me, and not just what I give to you, yes, I do believe in hope, yes, yes, yes…


And when you ask me, exhausted, quiet, “Can we sleep like this?” it breaks me to have to get up and leave because I cannot sleep, and you crawl onto the bed spread eagled and there is not enough room for me. That is the true truth, the one that is left unsaid, that cold fact that ploughs on without me like a train, that you do not love me, and never have loved me, and never will love me. That I do not believe in hope and yet cannot live without hope. That regardless of the truths that I know, I do not want to believe in them, I want to be happy even if I cannot be honest, that I do not want to leave this place, and I know that you would love me if I stayed. That leaving will not make me happy as it has never made me happy, and that I can only break so many more times before I am broken, and that I wish I could make you happy, truly happy, because that happiness would fill me more than my own not-truth not-real happiness ever could.


I only wish I were a fool, that could be deceived more easily, so that I could continue to pretend and continue to be happy and continue to not hurt, and continue, and just continue, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Every truth I come across halts my progress, and so it becomes that I both love and loathe the truth, that it sets me free but sets me free alone, and it becomes that I understand that I will always be this way, unlovely and unbeautiful, because I know too much of the truth and the pain makes it so.


So I sit here awake and know that you are in the next room and that if I asked you would make space for me on the bed, but that is all it is, making space. I know that your best friend was wrong, and that you do not love me, and that I should never allow myself to believe that anyone loves me again, because without love there is no pain, and without pain there is no truth, so without love and pain maybe I can be not happy nor honest, but neither, neither, at the same time.