December 21, 2012

[monologue] 

My dad said something seemingly out of the blue this summer. He asked: what if the world ends on December 21, 2012 not from a giant natural disaster or from Earth getting eaten by a black hole or the sun blowing up and roasting all of us alive; what if the world ends because we all destroy each other, he asked. Then we both sat very still and very silent and held hands for a long time. 

I had been working on this play for 4 months at that time. I had already completed the “data collection” portion of the writing process – 26 interviews, 30 hours of recording, some 300 plus pages of transcriptions – and I was feeling very confused to be perfectly honest. 

The intent of my project was clear at the onset, and I had managed to stay on track and focused for the most part. My goal was to explore different perspectives and expressions of sexuality at this school, inevitably have to address issues of hetero-normativity, male privilege, institutionalized silences, and matrices of power, but ultimately show that sex is not black and white and no one should ever feel they are alone. 

Easy. It’s everywhere. 

But as I immersed myself within the world of these interviews – excavating and distilling the portions to mold into stories, trying to complete this “complex” portrait of sex life, the mantra of “empowerment through storytelling” always in the back of my mind – the “distinct” different voices didn’t seem so clear anymore. 

Then something peculiar occurred to me. 

Behind the noise of the stories, there were two resounding frequencies that seemed to find their way into all of the interviews. And they made me uneasy. And quite sad. 

1. We all seem to be looking for the same thing: to connect with other people – to connect with ourselves – without layers of illusion, politics and he said she said bullshit 

2. Most of what we’re doing does not enable such connections to the point where… I’m not sure we know how to communicate with each other at all.

So I was confused. My initial questions didn’t seem as relevant anymore – what does sexual freedom mean to you? What about pleasure? What is your relationship with your body? …what music does your penis like to listen to? 

There was something more urgent behind all these answers that had to be addressed. But I was feeling stuck. 

And then it hit me. So were they. Stuck. 

And how you get un-stuck is to move. To speak. To listen. To open our hearts and open our eyes. To bow our heads and spread our arms. To understand that our stories are interwoven. To internalize the ways that we intersect. To become allies in one another’s battles. To figure out what we want. To ask for what we need. To choose to be happy and not just not-sad. To never settle. To travel into the heart center of fear and still choose love. To mold the world into what we want and know it can be. To care so deeply that we keep getting up again no matter how much we falter or fall or fail. To close the gap between us and them, self and other. To recognize that the journey there is to transform ourselves first, through deep learning and deep listening and the deepest love this world has yet to see. To fight for our lives. 

We cannot do any of this by being still. 

There’s a word that describes a desire to connect with other people but an inability to do so, and I think that word is lonely. And that’s why we were stuck: everyone was lonely but with people all around them. 

I realized something. My dad might be right. If the world was going to end it would be because of us. We would die of loneliness. Because in order to survive, we need one another. 

So dad, I hope the world doesn’t end this December. But I think that might be up to us to decide.

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Written by unknown, found in the 2016 script