###### Monologue

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I am in a husk of what my life used to be, which I only felt a part of four years ago, for a few months after graduating from college, working on a comedy-related research endeavor and my art. It depresses me, and I often find myself in a depression during my days and feel very little sense of relief, though I enjoy making my girlfriend laugh, maybe in part because she is often crying, which I think of as a unique quality in a person. I've never met anyone capable of immediately expressing their emotions like her; it is something our couples therapist refers to as her “superpower.” My girlfriend and I agreed not to have children together, despite my anxiety of missing out on feeling deep love for a child, which may be a valid anxiety, though being a parent is not a great reason to be alive, as your child can always die and, should that happen, you would probably have to kill yourself as a result, which my mother told me she might have to do if my brother and I both died before her. My mother does not believe in quitting, generally, she forced me to stay enrolled in swim team for a long period, which did not convert me to the sport or earn me a social circle. That only happened with theater, which I now regret joining, as that space was a violent one where repressed males created an uncomfortable alternative to a sports locker room where we demanded various forms of nudity from each other. As a high schooler looking to get into acting school, I did a monologue from the perspective of a teenager who ran over a toddler with his family's car, and I practiced the monologue constantly with my mother, who supported me, but said the way I was performing made me “look constipated,” which was true, I was heaving and clenching, trying to work up an anxious energy that parallels the tension I feel when I try to shit and can't. I didn't make it into most of the acting programs I applied to with this monologue, despite having starred in many school plays in which acting came easy, where I was an ebullient and charming comic performer praised by many, so I am not sure why that changed, and other people got accepted while I was rejected. I believe my mother was honest about my looking constipated because she loved me deeply and wanted me to succeed, which I recently recalled to a friend who found that funny, so we both laughed. He told me that seeing the popular film *Scarface* in a movie theater the week before was a “religious experience” for him, which I found surprising and made me question if I've ever had an artistic experience akin to a religious one. I am not spiritual, though I meditate sometimes, but not rigorously, so I am more anxious than I was raised to be.

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###### Play Fragment

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Once, as a child, I scuba-dived with my dad and sang the entire time, using up all my oxygen, so I needed to use his emergency oxygen to reach the surface, which was fine for me but scared the shit out of my dad, who couldn't believe I *sang* the whole time, but I firmly denied that I did, and even today only smile and shake my head when he brings it up, never confirming our reality. I always choose silent refusal over physical or verbal aggression, and the only fights I ever got into as a child involved me pinning my little brother down as he would try to punch me, possibly for good reasons, I can't remember; today, my brother is a much taller and stronger person than me, and the one time we fought during the COVID-19 lockdown, he grabbed me by the collar and lifted me up in front of our parents, which of course upset them, and I started screaming, so he let me go, and my whole family was surprised to find that my scream came out as a feminine, high-pitched shriek. I only feel protected by the women in my life, like my mother and girlfriend, and I mostly read books by and about women, and am friends with many. When I'm not in the presence of women, I become a sweatier, more nervous person with less to say, and have ever since I was a child, when my dear friend, Lisa, saved me from falling out of a tree we'd been hanging out in. We never kissed, and we were never boyfriend and girlfriend—we were so young—but I do think I fell in love with her when she saved me, and I realized that this little girl, maybe six years old, two years younger than I was at the time, was my protector, and my friend, my equal, and men had never saved me. I've loved men too, but I've never had a boyfriend, even though there was a time in college, as an incel at a large state school, when I really wanted to love a man or boy, which never really happened. I would take acid with my five male roommates, Chris, John, Rick, Jackson, and Jaco, and one time, I held John and listened to his heartbeat while *Animal Planet* was playing, and I fell in love with him then, mostly in a sensory way, feeling a world open up through his ribs, then opened my eyes to a polar bear eating a penguin, and said “oh no” at the sight of blood, though I did not throw up—I had done that on a different drug trip on different drugs, where it seemed that garbage made up the world, and humans, animals, buildings, and nature were all built from the same junk, which made me feel closer to a few different moody artists whose work had felt impenetrable before then, which I was grateful for. I fell in love with art partially due to my experiences with drugs, but I don't do them anymore, instead I sneak art into my days at work, listening to albums, watching videos, and reading articles. Most true pleasures are secrets, tucked away from life, even the conscious mind. I believe my girlfriend keeps secrets from me, though not large or hurtful ones, just normal ones, or small pleasures she may have developed as an only child. Sometimes, this concept brings me so much comfort that I want to cry and do so while we hold each other, which makes her cry, usually in our new apartment we just moved into together, in front of a huge open window between our beautiful new bookshelves to a street full of strangers, who may look up through the trees at us crying and see a sort of small film, which makes sense since we are both former theater kids who quit acting for writing, in part because we had had enough of the rejection, even though today we find that our article pitches get rejected all the time, though it's good that we're putting ourselves out there, despite how suffocating it is to work in a medium where we are still constantly refused, so sometimes, to soften the pain, I will sing to her about how whichever editor rejected us is a lying, perverted creep, projecting my voice to the world in a large, natural baritone, and she'll laugh then join in, calling them an abuser, filling the room with her surprisingly clear, classically trained mezzo soprano.

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