CHARACTERS

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WOMAN

MAN

 

SCENERY

(Half the stage is a white empty room with an only chair which is also white. Sitting on it we find WOMAN dress all in black holding a red handbag.

The other half is a black painted area. (Like LIMBO) In it, placed in the middle, is a grave with an epitaph with the phrase. “I AM NOT DEAD BUT FUCKED!”

On it sits HIM, dressed all in white.)

 

TIME

(Any time past, present or future to the director's imagination)

 

SYNOPSIS

(In a sense, the play occurs in the director's imaginary mind, including the time and place. A man and a woman (husband and wife contemplating their lives together and what went wrong with their marriage), with a twist?

 

 

(Lights on her side on) (The other side is in pitch darkness)

 

WOMAN

Why did I always remember the past? I don’t think it was healthy, yet I could never forget, and it depressed frequently. I tried to forget by consuming alcohol; it did for a bit, and then it came back in a flash; instead of forgetting, it saddened me more. I cried and cried. Did I ask for too much when I wished to be hit by dementia? Would it have made me forget completely?   He got ill at the beginning of my marriage. I could easily talk to him, crack a joke, or laugh; did he enjoy the laughter? He knew I was there for him and hoped for long years together.

I wished for dementia seriously. With Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common type of dementia, there is no dialogue. No attachment. No Closeness and no affection. There is no contribution at all! Did I ask too much when I asked for dementia?

 

(Lights off her side on) (Lights on his side on)

 

MAN

I used to be afraid of something good. Rescued, I wanted to be, I had the opportunity to call upon evil. I was in accordance through goodness, but I also found out it was also dreadful. I don’t know what I did when the water I drank turned out to be the very thing I hated most. The home I lived in wasn’t the home I wanted, and the woman I married was the wrong one. I played my last card at the end and lost too.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the woman’s  side on)

 

WOMAN

I kept thinking about what my life was all about. I have seen, at a very young age, unfaithfulness. I felt the victimisation of abuse. I loved and have been loved. I was insulted, mocked and brainwashed.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t let go. I was brokenhearted many times. Yet I ignored everything. I don’t see, feel, or have any notions. I blank everything out. A whole lifetime passed, and unfortunately, I only have memories to comfort me sometimes, but most of the time, I dismantle my senses, too. Those days, my life started with spring; the sun was not too hot but pleasant enough to understand nature. Then came Summer, when holiday romances for many started, making love here and there without any concerns. What fools they were! Autumn arrived, too; the weather became milder and damp. Tourists began to wither…..Then, the smell of winter was in the air; the cold weather mingled with weak hearts. (Laughs) What a fucking life.

Yet I wonder what ran through my veins. Was it pure red blood, or was it polluted by the vices I had committed over the years? Sometimes, no, not sometimes, but many times, when I looked in the mirror, I noticed my eyes on a miserable face, which said a lot.

Rummaging into my memories, without understanding what was all about, only that I was screwed, fucked and lived half dead.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Man’s  side on)

 

MAN

Sunday bloody Sunday, followed by the next bloody days.

My young wife then used to read books by the window, watching the hungry birds eat the crumbs of bread that she had left on a plastic plate earlier. I used to walk out quickly, go to the pub, and have a few sherbets, not because I enjoyed them but because I needed them.  There, too, I used to see the local vicar sitting at a table alone, drinking Guinness and forgetting about his congregation and I used to tell them that alcohol was the devil’s friend. On the way home to continue my work, I used to see Mrs So and So, who fancied me. I knew because she never stopped bugging me. I would have fucked, too, if she weren’t so ugly.

I must admit that I did have some evil planted into me, as much as anybody else. I even had some weird desires which frightened me shitless. I was no saint, far from it, yet I always walked in a straight line; that is, when I was sober. I knew it was a mean line; it was straight and narrow, sharp as a razor that cut right through into my stomach. I felt I was constantly bleeding on the line, and sometimes, I wondered why I did not step off it and walk on a broader road.

I never could monitor what happened to me. I never knew or bothered about what was around the corner. Yet I could control my attitude towards something that did occur; I mastered the changes that started to control my life. I was living through the determination of what I brought day by day. I did not care much about what happened; only my mind determined what had occurred. I tried to be positive, but I often failed; I craved a grateful attitude. I knew, too, that happiness was an outlook of the mind. I understood I wasn’t born to determine happiness.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the woman’s  side on)

 

WOMAN

I sought a better life far beyond my depression. I needed compensation for being born. I did not ask for it. Until then, I thought I would have peace of mind if I loved. I did believe in that, but doubts crept in and stayed there for a long time. Why did they torment me so much with these thoughts?

My difficulties met me with every minute that passed. There were no cures, so I thought that they were the conflicts that were created in the past; they haunted me all along. I seized my doomed life from its grave, not knowing the reason why. That’s what happened with a confused mind. I lived on the edge all the time, and he (my lousy husband) did nothing about it.

Having no cause for crying, I did a lot. I used to logically think that what was created couldn’t be undone. When I heard the sounds of unwholesomeness, there was no one to listen. It had conquered mediocrity, and I could do nothing about it. Within the boundaries of loving, there was my wounded heart, functioning in a way the morbid mind dictated. With that, I created fantasies, and they consumed me.

The revitalised body assumed some emotions, too, and kept the mind and heart abreast of love. There was some hope for me yet, I thought, or maybe a waiting hell! I contemplated that to the end of life itself, for I was murky and disproportionate.

Would I want to be revived again? I didn’t think so. I did not want to go through hell again.

 

Reconciled by these thoughts, reasoning contents have opened the compassion gates, and I wondered if I should accept them and go along with them. But no, I was stupid enough to decline everything. In justification of my beliefs, I should have known my transgressions were many. Did I want to be forgiven by my husband? To ask for that, I had to recognise the past roads, which were wide and weary.

 

I couldn’t cry for lost time departed so hastily. It was a different country, and I couldn’t live there anymore.

Unless psychiatrists could restore my sanity once again, I couldn’t call for the exasperated mind and the unadorned heart, where the spirit was weak and possessed. Consequential grief was not prescribed; it waited for an overall doom until it blacked out my existence.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Man’s  side on)

 

MAN

With those harassed thoughts in my mind, I used to have, the satanic seeker found a rarefied maze, for the fury created was only the pawn of terror, which stirred from the darkest manifested place called my life. At times, my eyes looked up at the sky at night, and my mind imagined it falling; for the dreams were horrid and deadly representational processes, I stood alone like a forgotten child. The toys given to me by nature consisted of bewilderment and incomprehension, games made of fantasies and illusions.

My mind couldn’t save fate; it had become the devil’s disciple; it stretched the imagination too far, plummeted into the darkness of the ageless void and played strangely to the awful imaginations; these were undesired, unwelcome, and unsought, for they were manipulated by me with those dreaded images. They provided Dark deeds, waiting at the doors of the darkest synapses of the mind and an unforgiving psyche on the road to its mysterious destination.

The thinking, the knowing, and the logic were on their way to the end in the cosmos of the infinitive junctions of the absurd, where there was no love and happiness. In this life I lived, the mind and the heart had false imagery that settled in comfortably and became fragments of my creation.

It was a sensual relationship between my wife and me. I fell for her charm quickly. From the start, it was a lustful relationship; she had just split up with her boyfriend because he had angrily bitten her on the lower lip very hard. I became very attached to her while she greeted me warmly. She had a beauty of a kind, sexually induced to a certain point. She wanted to make love immediately, so she planted the idea she had carefully constructed. That seduction was one of a kind. On her bed, we slipped; her body was fully equipped, and I was endowed pretty well, and that is where our lustful deeds streamed.

Those were the days, but only for a short time.

​

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the woman’s  side on)

 

WOMAN

Our sex life was great for a while, but nothing lasts forever. That is why tears often flooded my eyes. They came from the painful heart, while the brain determined the saddened moods. My tragedy started when I met him, my husband; something died within me right away. I called it the death of honest feelings and automatic reactions—the perception of felt pains and the knowing of being myself when I’m not.

In despair with the first moments of my sorrows, I knew well what suffering meant. I didn’t know how to be a head, and I didn’t. I had no hope and could not recover from it.

I was ashamed of my bewilderment, and I was angry with myself all the time. I feared sadness, and I did not believe in the value of happiness, enthusiasm, and encouragement.

Far away was my soul left. I  could not feel it, nor could I touch it or see it, but logic told us it was there; but there where? Was it somewhere where the stormy weather of life lay? I saw some future; in dreams, I saw bright prospects. I would have liked what my visions did, and if they got involved.

How pleasant it would have been to stay in dreamland, feeling free from grief and anguish. How pleasant it would have been if I had resided where the visions took me. I stood in silence, speaking words that searched for true feelings and composed melodies out of my pitiful heart. Darkness brought hope to a brightly lit misery. From the past came the tortured futures; it only held misery!

If only I could feel safe and dare show my discomfort, fondness and pains. If only I had someone to trust and believe in. In truth, I am a lonely woman. Woman? Did I utter the word woman? Whom am I kidding? True that I have the physique of a female with all the proper bits and pieces, but am I, within me, I mean, a woman of the female sex and inherited a pair of breasts, one each side, fertile and capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause?

Why is it that people greet others with good morning? What’s good about it? Before people say ‘good morning’ to me, why don’t they mind their business? How do they know how I feel? Suppose I have woken up from a restless sleep and am starting to have a good mental state. In that case, I wake up at 5 o’clock, not knowing what the hell I am up for, but once my eyes open and I realise I am still with the living, what else is there to do but get out of bed quickly before it takes hold of me and never lets me get out of it again. Can I imagine myself in a bed, day in and day out, cared for by grumpy nurses who would instead be smoking and having a glass of wine somewhere else instead of cleaning me up, changing my nappies and feeding me fast food, which I have always detested?

I have said some nasty things about my husband, yet he was a writer, a tranquil person, mysterious and sometimes scary. His thoughts and imagination, wherever they came from, were weird. Yet I knew he was a genius from the first time I met him. He manipulated words, and from them, he created bestsellers.

 

(Pauses and takes a deep breath.) Unfortunately, he suffered an emotional breakdown while confronting his inhibited aspirations. He was not easy to live with, yet I always said that if I didn’t like what he was, I should have looked elsewhere. I was truly bewildered, debated and confounded, and I didn’t have to look elsewhere. How he acted to specific challenges and questioned how I talked to him, how I dressed and whom I spoke with unsettled me. I did not know what to do. I sincerely loved and wanted to grow old with him, but something was alarming. Something scary, which I couldn’t put a finger on, was the deteriorating mind of the man I truly loved.

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(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Man’s  side on)

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MAN

I thought if I explored the possibility in which life could persuade the mind to gain the courage to commit suicide gradually. Would it have evolved to discover that the soul only exists on a higher plane, with an amount of spiritual advantage? However, the mysterious mind would not have benefited and formed a more significant part of consciousness. If death can persuade the mind to surrender to it and that it will reincarnate to some other form, will the heart and mind still refuse to die? I wondered.

When I tried to distinguish the existence of my conscience and make sure that I did sense it, would that have been a normal state of mind? If that was so, I am sure that whether it was expected or psychotic,  it could have sent me into panic and deemed me pathetic. I realised that my active conscience was in a continuous clash, in a horrendous battle between disagreement and controversy, displaying discrepancy with my inequality. Suppose my wife recognised my conscience for its importance in my decisions was accepted. In that case, I should have had the power to understand its excellent knowledge of its aptitude, faculty, and judgment of the intellect, which distinguished what I did wrong so that I could have accumulated the best effect.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the woman’s  side on)

 

WOMAN

My mind had gone soaring into the air, and my heart bled a lot. Was my love for him what caused me to have many failures? Probably, he manipulated my emotions. Pitiful were the facts that became unknown! And love, the only true beyond any state of logical sense, should not have left me. The only powerful emotion for him died.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Man’s  side on)

 

MAN

I was fascinated by women, and after all, they were unique and always be preordained companions. A woman in my time had no enlistment; she existed like me and might have conquered or surrendered! A woman, how disappointed it would have been if she didn’t give it all. The women I went with were sensual ladies, the ones who gave me pleasure and satisfied my needs.  Then the disaster approached, and I grabbed it like a fool. I met her, sensual and charming. I thought I would sleep with her once, like before with others. But no, she had other plans. She placed a bait under my mouth, and I, like a fool, rushed in, bit it and got hooked. Curiosity killed not the cat but my heart. Sometimes, it was a matter of peculiarity, not with her, which is why I became deranged. Because of this, I lost all my confidence. I lost my mind and abandoned my senses. I became resentful, arrogant, conceited and indignant. The affluence of my morality discarded; I became even more lustful, shameless and degenerate. Bad, polluted blood ran through the damaged veins, spurting out within and surrounding my heart. I suffered no pain for my already corrupted body. Out of my idiocy came transgression. Wicked and immoral beliefs flooded my mind, heart and eyes, too. Her immorality blinded me.

 

(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Woman’s  side on)

 

WOMAN

Do I have anything else to mention? I said it all. No, no, not quite. Some may be wondering what is there for me now. I have lived with him for ten years. Two years ago, the doctor told me I was pregnant, and the baby was due last April next year. That was about right as I conceived in August. I had planned a new, fresh life, but with a baby to look after, that was impossible; that is what I thought, at least. So, although he was there with me, I was alone. I knew he did not want the baby; I am not stupid; I knew how HE reacted when I told him the news. Alone, I stayed even after what happened. And alone, I still am, even without him. But I had one consolation in those days. I wanted someone to communicate with, even though it had to be after two or three years. I thought the baby would start uttering words and later talk a bit, but I knew I would not listen, and I didn’t think I had the patience. So, I was destitute, reclusive and comfortless. Yet everything was unknown to me at that time. I had to concentrate on the uncomfortable time of waiting for the next eight months. I don’t think I wanted to see another human being. I was scared! Today, sitting here will be the last time. I patiently wait for them to visit me. Today, I took this previous walk and came here; I thought the fresh air and the surroundings would do me good.

 

You see, after a few weeks of my pregnancy, I started to bleed heavily. Eventually, after three days in the hospital, I had a miscarriage. My husband visited me, though he did not say anything except that he was sorry; that’s when I thought I should do something about it.

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(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Man’s  side on)

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MAN

I was wrong from the beginning. There should never have been a baby. I don’t deny it; I knew this from the beginning. I didn’t need to be reassured; I didn’t need sympathy. I saw clearly from the start because I’ve never seen anything so vigorous and distinct since I learned about the pregnancy. I didn’t want the baby. She deceived me. I did not want to be a father; I did not want the responsibility to tie me up for good.

On the other hand, she wasn’t strong enough. She knew damn well she couldn’t handle it on its own, and the embryo couldn’t become a fetus because she was a weak, unstable woman. In other words, it had to be flushed away.

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(Lights off and in pitch darkness) (Lights on the Woman’s  side on)

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WOMAN

I’ve tried to turn my compassion into hate and hate into action. Nothing could save the bastard, then. I hated him to death!

That is when I grabbed the most significant and sharpest knife and stabbed him in the heart!

 

 

BLACKOUT

END