AIDS monologue

Well… What do I remember? I remember the smell of disinfectant lining the corridors, the sound of constant working, rattling machinery. I don’t remember names at all now – well, I never was good with names – but I remember some smiles. They were nearly always sad, but never quite the same in the way the eyes crinkled, the mouth curled, the folds of the face hinted at hope, or the lack of it; the longing for the dissolution of the self, or for life – or both, sometimes… I wish I knew which I longed for.

Anyway, the – what it was like, yes. Sometimes there’d be visitors in those strange little off-white rooms, but almost more often it’d just be me and the inhabitant and the shadows, he lying there smiling his very own smile and I standing, plumping the pillows, administering the useless medicine, straightening the sheets, those crisp white linen sheets whiter than the white of the eyes.

And one day you’d walk into a room – you’d walk into a room, and such-and-such a smile or such-and-such a smile would just be sort of… gone. And the bed – on the bed there would just be this ruffled sheet, crumpled up in the middle of it there. And I would walk over to the bed – I would walk over to the bed, and I would pull taut those ruffled sheets; I would straighten them over the hard square bed until it was all flat and ready for the next one.

And looking back – well, looking back… you just think… it all seems like such a waste. Such a… bloody waste. And you think – it’s almost a wonder they allowed it to happen, really. If it had been me – well, if it had been me, I think I might just have exploded, set the whole country alight: whoosh!; bang!; poof!

Ah. But I didn’t. I… bloody didn’t. I didn’t come anywhere near. I just… stood there. Straightening sheets. Straightening ruffled sheet after sheet after sheet in all those empty off-white rooms, and every so often I would turn to the shadow of a man, and I would smile, like so:

This is, as the title suggests, a monologue, and consequently it’s really meant to be performed, so if it feels a bit flat whilst reading, that explains why. I played it “all stiff and strange”, as a friend admirably described it, but you could probably play it other ways, if you felt like it, not that I expect you to, particularly. Seeing as I’d written this, and think it’s not too shoddy, I suppose thought I might as well throw it up on here just in case anybody was interested. If I feel like it I might make and post a little recording of it at some point.