Play 287: Hell If I Know

CHARACTERS
VINCENT, 17

VINCENT
I can’t think when I’m feeling like this. It’s kind of funny how they always talk about depressed writers and artists. These tortured souls pouring out their emotions on the page. Their misery propelling their art to a new plane of existence.

(He laughs.)

It’s all bullshit. When I feel like this, I can’t write at all. I can’t think. I try to, and nothing happens. I keep screaming at myself to think of something, but it doesn’t do anything. Just gets lost in this haze in my head. This dull gray haze.

(Beat.)

The only thing remotely creative I can do in moods like this is think of different metaphors and analogies to explain how I feel. None of them really capture it at all, they just sound kind of clever. A cute little image of a part of it, more made to sound pretty than to actually capture anything.

(He shakes his head.)

None of it really means anything. All it is is words. No matter how nice they sound, that’s all they are.

(Beat.)

(He laughs.)

Depression doesn’t help create anything. Thinking that's just romanticized bullshit. It’s like saying if you cut off a writers hands and repeatedly stabbed him with needles while he wrote that he’d be a better writer because he’d know true pain.

(He laughs.)

Fuck that, he’d be a better writer if he could focus without the needles and had his goddamn hands.

(Pause.)

What am I trying to say with all this? With all this ranting and these bizarre stretched metaphors?

(He laughs.)

Hell if I know.

(Beat.)

You figure it out.

(Blackout.)