Big Girls Don't Cry
A monologue written for the stage.
Female character comes onto the stage, set up like a bathroom. She calls back to someone in another room.
“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do? Surely some chopping or something?”
(distant from other room) “Oh, well if you could chop the onion when you’re out that would be great!”
She is visible panicked.
Fuck. Onion chopping is what I avoid at all costs. It makes me cry. And I don’t mean that stinging, single tear rolls down the cheek, eyelashes get wet and look all long and dark, rub my eyes “haha omg it’s so silly I’m crying” kind of way.
I mean, mucus, and snot, and deep heaving breaths that feel like you will never get enough oxygen. That awful headache of dehydration, bloodshot and puffy, kind of way.
I haven’t cried without an onion since I was 8.
But it doesn’t take much to remember.
I’m 8 years old. I know my face is the same colour of the cherry Jolly Rancher I ate at recess. I can’t look up at my mother, called to pick me up from school. The drive home is silent. My laces are fascinating, the way they loop back and forth in perfect crosses and manage to stay like that. My body sways with the familiar turns of going home.
“They are vultures, you know. Any sign of weakness and they start to swarm.”
If I squeeze my fists hard enough my knuckles turn white and my palms turn red.
“Your emotion is your power, you can’t give it to just anyone. You’re young, so enjoy it now, but soon crying will become a privilege, one which you don’t have.”
I swallow the lump and blink away the heat in my eyes.
Beat.
Forced lightheartedness “I don’t really like chopping onions, smell drives me crazy”
From the kitchen “Well it’s not my favourite either, darling”
Beat.
It’s seventh grade, the time of raging hormones and first crushes and sometimes, unfortunately, unfiltered, unrestrained teenage cruelty. And I haven’t cried since I was 8.
The boys gather around my friend, their next chosen victim, “does she speak? Is she slow?” There’s laughter but nothing is funny.
They look at me, watching.
“What are you looking at? It’s just a joke,” He spits.
“Stop it. She’s obviously not finding it funny”
My first time getting drunk is on power. I have mastered the art of setting my jaw and glazing my eyes and taking another step, no matter what.
The fucked up thing is that it works. When I decide to release just a little and get angry, people fucking listen. Even the boys, the malicious teenagers who hide themselves under a guise of a joke. They fucking listen “bro stop that’s too far, she’s not fucking with it.”
My emotion is my power.
Beat.
Back in the bathroom “What am I doing?”
There’s stressed movement. Conflicting inner dialogues.
I’m 18. I feel nothing. I don’t even get angry anymore. The boys are no longer cruel, they are desirable, and my friends no longer need protecting and I still feel nothing.
The problem with being numb is that the emotions still build up, I just don’t feel them.
I see my mum chopping an onion in the middle of the night, weeping. Full body sobs. My feet are roots. I have never seen my mother cry.
I decide to chop an onion in the middle of the night.
There is stinging. My face is wet. I am granted permission. I cry for the first time in 10 years. I cry for 3 hours and when I finish I feel marvelously, beautifully empty. I may just float away.
Beat
It’s movie night. In the glow from the screen I can see damp faces, and sleeves reaching to rub eyes. There are quiet sniffles and soft chuckles at how “soft” everyone is. It’s just a movie after all. But marley is dying, the boys are saying o captain my captain, and I feel nothing.
The plates of snacks sit untouched on the coffee table. My friends denying themselves of food and I’m denying myself of emotion, and here we sit, all of us wasting away.
Beat
It would be comical if it wasn’t so fucked up.
And now this man, this man who I love; who is in the kitchen cooking for me, has, unknowingly, asked me to, in the god awful fluorescent light of his kitchen, peel myself back, layer by layer.
Maybe it’s time I give him a little bit of my power. Maybe he’ll tell me I never need to chop an onion again. Maybe he will be my onion.
“Yeah, no problem! I’ll be out in a second”
Laughs
He has no fucking idea what he’s gotten himself into.