"Tell Tale Signs" 🅴

This scene is played out on two separate areas of the stage. Spotlights are cast on Levi and Amy who do not interact with one another directly.

Levi: “God dammit Amy! We’re not kids anymore.” This back and forth is bullshit and you know it. You’re impossible. “You can’t just keep waltzing out of my life” and “leaving clothes on my bedroom floor” because you feel like it. We are a mess. I’m usually actually super clean and put together. I’ve let you do this to my life and maybe it is only a metaphor for our relationship, but we have to quit. You keep acting “like nothing really matters” that your “pain doesn’t hurt.” I don’t understand how you can be so nonchalant about all of this. We’ve been together long enough that “you should be more to me by now than just heartbreak in a short skirt.” Maybe that’s what this is…really good looking, enticing, heartbreak.

Amy: Honestly, I think what we have is great. You yelled at me to get out the other day and I can’t even remember the specifics. Something about my clothes on the ground and the mess I’ve made of your life. I don’t mean to make a mess of anyone’s life. That seems really scary and dramatic. “You kind of remind me of scars on my arms that I made when I was a kid.” The intention to feel pain that wasn’t in my mind. It was so easy to take “a disassembled disposable razor” that “I stole from my dad” to ease the internal pain and terrible thoughts. It was fortuitous that you and I met. You fill something in my life that I didn’t know what necessary. “Suffering [has always been] something profound” to me. It’s not worth it if you don’t have to suffer some. It’s the stuff that “[weighs] down on wise heads.” It’s for creatives and it’s for those who don’t know any better. It’s “not just something to be avoided” or “that normal people dread.” Everything I’ve done has been with this anxiety about our relationship. I need my stuff at your place because it means we are serious.

Levi: “It’s not even love any more.” I don’t know what to do.

Amy: The mess I leave is “just a claim.”

Levi: Thinking about you is a pain “upon my soul.” Your touch “it stains my skin.”

Amy: Your name is “on my breath.” I’m excited to see you later.

Levi: There are too many “tell tale signs that you have left all over me.” When you get here later, I’m going to have to find the courage to end whatever it is we have.

Lights fade slowly for both actors.

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