Monologue

Musik: I Don't Love You - My Chemical Romance
Kleiden: PJs, with big red hoodie
Filme: Public Enemies (Mann)
Buchen: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I don't normally write monologues, due to a traumatic experience in my AS year but I decided to give it another go.

I know you don’t give a fuck about me. This is your job, you do it every day. It grinds on you with a terrible jarring, grating sound like fingernails across a blackboard. You have to sit and listen to every sorry fucker who comes your way. The whole thing bores you; the air around you is like carbon monoxide gas; poisonous and slowly sapping the life out of you. Things are stagnant. You meticulously note down what I am saying. It makes your hand ache. You just wish people would tell you everything the first time round, instead of holding things back as though they were the most personal thing in the world. You wish they knew that their insanity was mundane to you. Nothing shocks you anymore.

When you go home at night it is already pitch black. You are so tired, all you want to do is let the soft sheets of your bed envelope you. Your spouse kisses you softly on the cheek; asks how your day was. But you have nothing to report. Everything blurs into one nowadays.

You sluggishly eat the over-cooked meal that has been waiting in the oven for you for hours. The kids are already in bed; you won’t see them properly until the weekend at the earliest. When you go to check on them they are dead to the world, sleeping like little cherubim. There’s a soft glow of cleanliness surrounding them as you kiss them on the cheeks. They do not even stir.

Years and years you dreamt of this. You remember that first year at university, telling everyone with a blinding glow of pride that you were a medic. Everyone, without exception, was impressed by this. For the first three years you enjoyed every second of it; lapped up knowledge as though it were nourishment. Then, most people left; graduated and began work. But that was okay. You were in it for the long haul.

You had always been interested in the human mind, and so that is what you specialised in. It was fascinating, you loved sitting in on the examinations with the senior doctors. Every case was new and interesting. Finally, after seven long years, you were ready. But ready for what?
You were so well qualified, top of your class, that you got a job right away. This was it. This was your life, and you’d even had time to pick up a partner along the way. A marriage amidst the textbooks. The kids were on the way. You had a house, a nice car. This was it.

Yes, that’s all. All that work and you get to listen to people talking about their problems and you never say a word about your own. Nobody can know the emptiness that is within you, because it should not be there. Your life is perfect. What is there to cry about?

I know you don’t give a fuck about me. You don’t give a fuck about anything anymore.