Everything Changes

This piece is a spoken word monologue performed in front on an audience. Ideally there should be no other distractions to detour the audience from focusing on your words. The monologue goes:

"Things never change at all like people expect them to. In the evening, thoughts are raw and imminent. The world is warm, drunk and hazy and it’s so easy to lose yourself in the energy of the people, and the world around you. It's so easy to shout: “Yes! I understand! I am the world! I feel it as it flows through me! Ifeel every stir of every person in their beds and I feel the trees hum all around!”. It’s so easy to know, and understand everything that is the world and know the answer to every problem but then you wake up in your body. Your friends are strangers , and the world is distant and scary. The problems that were so simple and so easy to fix in the night are now immense and immoveable facts of life and once again, your mind is restrained and kept inside the cage it creates for itself.  The night didn’t change a thing because a night never can. Everything you understood is like grasping at a dream before it’s pushed out of your mind by work, or school, or being held to the expectations of day to day life. Nothing has changed. Whoever you become in the night, wherever you go, you are transported and dropped back right where you were and who you were the day before left with only a headache and the emptiness of losing what you thought you could keep forever.
People are weak and irreversibly damaged. We weren't always like this but knew too much and had to adapt. It became the only way for us to survive in this crooked world of our's because we don't ever recover from the things that make us sick, all we can do is grow over and keep living. People can search for a meaning of life but the answer doesn't matter. There are people who will tell you they have found one in God or Love and people who will tell you there isn't one but neither of them have killed themselves. In fact, the reason why we can never know is the same reason why we are irreversibly damaged; if we were ever at the point when we knew how to be completely happy within ourselves, we would have no reason to live and so we have to hold ourselves back.

People are always looking to leave but no one ever does. People are always trying to find a way out of wherever they have found themselves in but they are always waiting for the right moment, then, before they even realize, they're 80 years old and have been dying in the town they were born in their entire life. People don't want to believe that they can disappear. Whether you like it or not, there is a plane leaving to whatever city you'd rather be in right now but you won't take it, not without adequate planning at least! But, by them, you haven't left anything at all! You've just taken what you're trying to get away from all this time with you and that's why everyone, everywhere wants to be somewhere else, because they don't realize what the thing is they are desperately trying to get away from.

I don't know anything special. I'm just the same as anyone, but, where others have become complacent, I don't want to let myself become a victim of time and place. I want distance to be my friend, where it tears apart so many others. I never want to wait for a moment to do what I want with my life. Maybe one day I'll see one of you in a street in New York or a Subway in Tokyo and I'll smile, and wave,  and be happy to see that you too have escaped and avoided the mistake of apathy.

Things never change at all like people expect them too and if you hang around waiting for that one, singular moment to come and change your life and effortlessly whisk you away from everything keeping you grounded, you will die, old and bitter or, if you're lucky, young with bleeding wrists in a bathtub."

This piece was premiered at Sound Spectrum Festival in April, 2013