When I No Longer Know A monologue by: Tamar Assayag
Sometimes I feel like I’m dozing off. Not from a lecture by a teacher who is failing to get the class’s attention, not from my mom trying to tell me how I should clean my room more often (not that I ever will). But from life. I doze off from life. From reality. From everything that’s happened and from everything that could. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like, one minute I’m here. I’m grounded. I can see and feel what’s around me. But then the next, I just blank out. Imagine you’re watching a movie and after all the credits roll, the screen goes black. Everything turns black and you just don’t know where you are or who you are anymore. Are you the hero from the movie, awaiting their next adventure? Are you the person you were before you clicked play on the remote? Or are you some alien from a different universe and you can’t identify with anyone in this strange land? That’s how it feels. You’re split between worlds, and yet somehow you don’t even exist. You’re everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes when that happens, all I see is darkness. Just plain darkness. And then I start to shiver and it suddenly feels like someone just poured ice-cold water down my shirt. Other times I look ahead and I see a green screen. Red dots appear on the screen and as I involuntarily zoom into the red dots, they turn into images. Videos. Memories. Are they from my life? I don’t know. Maybe they’re from the past. Perhaps an old farmer living in the 1700s, about to be presented with the news that a child of theirs had died in battle. Or maybe it is of the future. I see a scientist combining chemicals, unaware that they’re about to make the biggest discovery of the century. I simply don’t know. It could be anything. Or it could be nothing. But whatever the reason may be that this happens to me, it does. And I can’t control it.
