Runaway

monologues class:
Prompt: write an opening monologue to the play of your life.
-holy hell, thats a heavy assignment. i think this could be a lot better though i like the action of the piece.

(Lights up on AIMEE sitting at a table downstage center, a laptop computer sitting in front of her, as well as a stack of books. She is typing as the lights come up. The rest of the stage is bare)
AIMEE

You know those silly surveys people forward to you through email and are all over myspace? I am addicted to them. It’s my favorite form of procrastination. I can spend hours thinking up witty answers to silly questions. “Are you sarcastic?” No! Me? Sarcastic, never! “Would you let someone shave your entire body (including your head) for $100,000?” My head only, there is no way I will deal with arm stubble for the rest of my life. One of my favorites is “What is your favorite swear word?” I then spend about three sentences explaining that I don’t swear out loud unless it’s included in a song. Ah, good times. When I get really bored, which is a step after spending a half hour searching movie quotes to use as titles for my blog posts, I go deep into the archives of my blogs and redo old surveys. I get a total kick out of reading what I wrote a few years ago. What’s even better is reading survey’s I did before I graduated high school. It’s amazing how much some of my answers have changed. “Have you ever been drunk before?” Then: absolutely not. Now: hah! Oh yes. “What are you looking forward to?” Then: going to college! Now: graduating from college! The answer to one question in particular has changed a lot, “Have you ever run away from home.” In high school this question was incredibly easy to answer. It was a big resounding no. I’d never as so much as sneak out of the house, let alone run away. Now, the answer lands in a bit of a gray area, and it really depends on my mood. I didn’t run away from home in the traditional sense. However, if you ask my friends and family back east, I think you will find that they are under the impression that I did. I guess it really depends on how you define ‘run away.’ If it’s only that you leave home without telling anyone, well I didn’t do that. But, if you put it more as leaving home to live somewhere else against advice to do otherwise, then I definitely did that. On August 24th of 2003, I gave a tearful goodbye to my parents, got on a plane with two large suitcases and flew 2,000 miles away to go to school. I got a lot of flack from people back home. They said that I left them and that I should have just gone to school closer to home. Now, I’ll admit I was miserable for most of my freshman year. There were times that I felt that the homesickness was utterly unbearable, but I am much too stubborn to give up that quickly. I stuck it out for that first year, I made friends and eventually started to feel at home here.
(For the rest of the monologue, furniture is brought in upstage. It is a dorm room, consisting of two beds, two desks, two sets of drawers, a mini fridge and television.)
Leaving those friends at the end of my freshman year proved to be as hard as leaving my family the previous August. Little did I know that the next few years of my college experience were going to make my freshman year pale in comparison. Lucky enough for me, I have almost all of those weird and crazy experiences recorded in my many blogs, usually in the form of a silly survey.
(AIMEE crosses upstage with her laptop. The table remains downstage. She sits on the stage right bed, and starts typing again.
12 february 2007