These two monologues were originally written for a heartbreak open mic that took place on the 22nd of February 2025 at The Pond in Copenhagen. I’m publishing it in full as I am proud of it and want to share it with the world, but it is also an incredibly intimate and personal work of art that still burns my throat as I try to read it aloud.
I sit across from you in this room with three walls. It is lavishly decorated with expensive silks, fine art, intricate craftsmanship, all drawing the eye of the beholder towards a single ornate door. Neither of us wants to talk, we did not part on good terms. I believed you were callous and harsh, refusing to make the effort to take care of me. “I don’t owe you my time” is what you said as I was breaking down about how you unpleasant you were to me, about how abandoned you made me feel. Now here we are, opposite each other, at the end of the road, waiting for something to happen. I am keenly aware of my breathing, the belaboured intakes of air followed by sharp exhalations. I had really hoped we didn’t have to meet in this way, I wished we had the chance to reconcile with each other before the end. It would have been a dream to meet with you and build something together that could culminate into a creation greater than the sum of its parts. In reality I wasn’t the person who you were destined to build anything with, and I needed to accept that fact.
I can’t help but wonder why it didn’t work out, if there was anything else I could have done to make you understand exactly how you make me feel. The comfort and warmth I felt with my head nestled into the crook of your arm. You told me about your trauma and I told you about mine. We grew closer than any two people who weren’t planning on dating should have, it was messy and had the potential to blow up in our face. Perhaps we didn’t work out because I wasn’t the kind of person you lavish in surrounding yourself with, maybe I could have been, but unfortunately I was moving in a different direction. We were just painfully incompatible people it seems, or maybe the timing was just off.
And our eyes lock together, you avert your gaze, almost like you don’t want to face the fact that there is still an ember of a connection that you don’t dare acknowledge for fear that in the moment you observe it it snuffs itself out. It is in catching your troubled eyes that I realise that this is more than just my personal hell, because whilst hell is other people, other people are also our salvation. And so, I stand before you, and extend my hand for you to grab at your leisure, and I will stand here until you feel ready to take it. Because when you do, it means we’ll both be ready to move on from each other, to exit this purgatory of our own creation. Whatever smouldering remains of what once was would be gone, and we will no longer be bound to this room.
I wrote the first monologue, drawing from Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit in an attempt to put my thoughts about losing you into context. Within this monologue I place us as the subjects of a play being performed for an audience, and I also place us at the end of the road, after our story has been told. We have been judged by the almighty and guided by the valet into our own private hell. A hell where we never reconcile with each other, and our torment is to sit in uncomfortable silence for all eternity, refusing to acknowledge each other and the ways in which our lives were intertwined, and how we are both responsible for the pain that comes from refusing to acknowledge what we were. By metaphorically extending my hand to you in this monologue I put hope into us reconciling before it’s too late, you mean a lot to me, more than I can feasibly put into words.
I’ve not been handling you moving away well at all. And whilst I don’t think the way I have acted is entirely out of the blue, I do think I am expecting too much of you. This brings me to the second piece of art I am referencing in these monologues. A lot of my art recently has been dedicated to processing my grief over you moving away. We had a fight on Valentine’s day just before I wrote these two monologues. I was miserable about losing you, and I missed being able to rest my head in your arms, you appeared to be pulling away from me, and that led to a lot of resentment. Suddenly, before I even had the chance to finish these monologues, you had already reached out to grasp my outstretched hand. I’m sorry for being harsh to you, you didn’t deserve it, I love you, and I always will.
This is going to fucking suck isn’t it?