Monologue
Adaptive Radiation — Robert
Hannah Benitez
Robert: My deepest darkest secret … (He is very overwhelmed with the feeling of coincidence. Then, he makes sure no one in the office can hear them.) Things in my life used to be magical. But they are not anymore. My mother turned into a sofa, and my father turned into a compass. Magic is not always nice. I was eleven years old when my father filled one backpack with everything he needed to survive, walked into the living room and announced to my mother that he was leaving. Mom didn’t move her eyes from the television or say a word. Her matching baby blue blouse and skirt were the exact same color as the sofa, I remember. My father turned to me and said “Either come, or don’t” and walked out the door, leaving it ajar slightly. A sudden breeze entered the room and swept my mother into the air and into a thousand fuzzy blue and gray pieces.
They danced for a moment and gently floated into the cracks of the sofa now forever embedded in its fibers and deep crevasses. This wasn’t surprising as mom had been slowly turning into the sofa for some time now. So with a piece of furniture for a mother, my decision was pretty clear. I lived with my dad for three years on the move, always moving, through a few national parks, camping, moving when park enforcement would push us along. Then one day, as he was boiling perch he caught for breakfast, my father turned into a compass. (Beat) This matte, gold, compass. I kept it close, slept with it under my pillow as I spent my remaining adolescence living with my aunt and uncle. And I became determined to bypass the overwhelming confusion brought on by the absurdity of our irrelevance in the grand scheme of the universe and work toward explaining it. Life. The rules of it. How it all works. Starting with cells. Bacteria. Organs. All the way to the macrobiome that is us. Because data, data never betrays you. It never dies unexpectedly.