Category Archives: love

inmigration, love, religion

I SAW THE LIGHT

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[A simply dressed blue-collar type, in his late forties, with stubble beard and a Southern drawl.]

“We weren’t the churchgoing type… but when Pastor Sank arrived, everyone was sayin’ how great he was, how inspiring…

So we started attending most Sundays, the whole family.

The first time I heard Pastor Sank I thought he was too… aggressive, you know, screaming from high up on the pulpit, his face all red, sayin’ that the whole world was going to hell, that our society was rotten… He was big on the idea that all the immigrants were invadin’ our way of life.

Angry or not, his words rang true to us… probably because we had heard the same ideas in the news… and we were afraid.

Then, one Sunday, Pastor Sank announced he had had a vision and the Lord had told him that the world would end two months from then, on October the fourth.

We didn’t believe him right away. Plenty of people been scammed by this sort of thing, you know… but Pastor Sank wasn’t asking for money or anything… all he wanted was for us to follow him around the country, talking to people about his prophecy, warning them, gettin’ them to repent…

Everyone in the parish was on board…  and so were we.

I quitted my job and we sold everything. Used some of that money to fix our old RV so we could join the…. Final Crusade, that’s how Pastor Sank called it.

We drove north along the coast, stopping in every town, talkin’ to folks about the end of the world, trying to save them from the depths of hell….

It wasn’t an easy road. Some looked at us as if we was crazy… others looked on us with pity. But rest assured, if we ever needed anything, directions, or a bathroom for the kids, we could always depend on some stranger’s kindness. Yeah, we got to meet a lot of folks that way. A lot of ’em very different from us… some of ’em even immigrants.

Anyway, October the fourth came… and went… and nothing happened. Pastor Sank said it was a miscalculation; that the rapture would happen in two weeks instead…

Enough was enough.

We went back home… broke and jobless.

It took some time for us to bounce back from that slump.

But despite all that, I have no regrets… Thanks to Pastor Sank, we had a chance to see beyond our little town, to discover other people and understand how they think…

You could say we stopped being scared of the world after that trip.

We also stopped going to church.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

love, memory, video

IN SILENCE

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EXTENDED VERSION:

[A woman in her mid-thirties. Soft spoken but with an expression that denotes intelligence. She holds a cell phone.]

“My mother passed away recently… and quite unexpectedly.

The first few days after her death I missed her so badly that all I did was look at photos of her… I had this weird fear of forgetting what she looked like…

I went through every single photo she was in. I searched albums, shoeboxes, my phone, my computer…

I paid special attention to the portraits that captured her in a natural pose, unaware of the camera’s presence. I would stare at those images for so long… trying to get a glimpse into her soul, into her real self… and maybe because of that intensity, the photos began to lose their meaning.  After a while, they became mere representations of my mother… lies, in a way.

Then I moved on to her voicemails saved on my phone… dozens.

I listened to them over and over, very carefully, trying to find my mother in her short greetings, in her requests to call her back as soon as I had time…

They were satisfying at first…  like a comfort blanket…

Until one day her messages started to sound artificial… I could predict what she was about to say; I found myself mocking her inflections…

I realized that, like with the pictures, I had exhausted her recorded voice…

I was devastated, and frustrated. So much so that I began deleting all her messages, one by one…

Until I got to one that was almost two minutes long… I had always skipped it before because it was a butt call, you know, an accident…

All you can hear in it is a subtle breathing and some creaking sounds, maybe from the chair my mom was sitting on.

But that day I listened to the message, the whole thing this time…

I could feel my mother in that silence, as if she was alive, as if I was spying on her from behind a door. I was curious about her… asking myself what was she doing, what was she thinking…

I started crying half way into the recording.

I cried out of happiness because I’d finally felt her in that silence. I was more than happy, I was at peace… there she was, my mother, living in a question mark… in an unwritten story.

I deleted the other messages and kept only that one.

Sometimes I play it… but not too often… I’m afraid to wear it out too.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

destiny, love

IMPERFECT FUTURE

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[A good-looking man on a red polo shirt. He’s fifty, but you’d guess forty. He seems the pragmatic type, missing some deeper emotions.]

It’s so silly when you think about it…

I was eighteen… a friend asked me to go with him on a double date…

The other girl – who wasn’t that attractive I must say – claimed to be a psychic and insisted on reading my palm…. For shit and giggles I guess…

I didn’t believe in those things, but I wasn’t opposed either, or at least I wasn’t back then.

And so she began looking at my palm and telling me all these things about my life, my health, my studies; obvious stuff…

At some moment she turned silent…

I asked her what was going on, but she refused to tell me.

Of course, I insisted…

She then pointed at this line in my palm and said that, one day, I’d meet the love of my life, my true love… but that she would die soon afterwards.

Again, I’m not superstitious, but that prediction obsessed me for a long time

For starters, it made me afraid of falling in love… or more afraid I should say.

And then, on the other hand, those girls I took more seriously… well, those I got disillusioned with after a while… when I saw they weren’t dying.

Then I got over it and, a few years later, I met a girl.

We married.

I was happy, or at least I thought I was.

From time to time, I would remember that silly prediction and laugh at it…. And at myself for half believing it.

Then it happened…

My oldest son had just turned eight… he got invited to a birthday party.  My wife couldn’t take him, so I did…

That’s where I saw her for the first time.

Of course I thought she was pretty, beautiful in fact; but you know, I was married…

I swear I don’t remember how we started talking but, before we left that party, I knew I was in love with her, more than I had ever been with anyone else, including my wife.

She gave me her number. I called her and we met… in secret… she was married too.

We discussed a possible relationship; she said she’d think about it…

We kissed but never made love.

The next day she died… car crash.

Did I kill her by loving her?

Or did I decide I loved her just because she died?

My worst fear is that it was all mere chance.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016