SCENE 1: I AM A LONELY MAN
I am a lonely man. A sick man. Broken, shrunken, and silent in a small, stifling room where the walls press inward, heavy with the secrets of my failures. Something inside me feels cracked. Maybe it’s my liver, swollen from years of quiet damage. Maybe it’s my heart, worn out from its steady, mechanical beat. But most likely, it’s that nameless place where hope once lived. Now it’s hollow, like a well run dry, its bottom coated in dust.
I am thirty-one, though I’ve started telling people I’m forty-three. The lie slips out so easily now, I almost believe it myself. Thirty-one feels too young for this kind of exhaustion. Do I want pity from strangers, or do I just need my weariness to feel earned, legitimate, worthy of its own weight?
Life moves slowly now, dull and indifferent. Each day drags into the next, like a clock that ticks but never chimes. My existence feels mechanical—a series of repetitive motions: wake, breathe, exist. Whatever light I had is gone, dimmed like a dying candle. I tell myself it’s fine, that emptiness is normal, even logical. But then I catch myself in a lie, and the contradictions tear at me until I wonder if there’s anything left of who I used to be.
I live in what I call a room, but it’s really just a box—eight feet wide, ten feet long. The walls feel warped, leaning inward like they’re tired of standing. The bed is narrow, barely enough to hold me, as if mocking the idea that I need rest. The single window shows nothing but a sky stained with smoke, a reminder of the city’s endless hunger for dreams. This place wasn’t built for living—it was built to strip away dignity, to remind me that survival is all I get.
I don’t try to make it feel like home. That’s for people who still believe in their lives, who think tomorrow might be better than today. My things lie where they fell— Books with cracked spines sit untouched, their stories forgotten. Shirts lie in a heap on the floor because wearing them would mean I have somewhere to go. Papers are piled up, their edges yellowing, reminding me of the person I thought I’d become. This room feels like a storage closet for my failures, with every object reminding me of the life I’ve let slip away.
The air here is thick and stale. In summer, the room becomes an oven, baking away whatever humanity I have left. Sweat pools at the base of my neck, soaking into the pillow. The air refuses to move. In winter, the radiator clanks and hisses, giving just enough heat to keep me from freezing, but the cold still seeps into my bones. Everything here is measured—light, air, space. Just enough to keep me breathing, but never enough to make me feel alive.
Above my bed, the ceiling is marked with water stains that have spread over the years. They’ve become a map I know too well. To the left is the Sea of Regret, dark and endless, swallowing everything it touches. In the middle is the Mountain of Forgotten Promises, a pile of broken dreams stacked so high it’s starting to crumble under its own weight. And in the farthest corner, small as a secret I’m ashamed to keep, shrinks the Island of Childhood Dreams. Each time I look, it’s smaller. One day, it will disappear completely, and I’ll have nothing left to mourn.
Most nights, I lie awake, staring at the stains on the ceiling as the hours drag on. I can’t help but feel like they’re growing, slowly spreading across the surface, just like my disappointments have spread across the years. Each stain feels like a reminder of a broken hope or an abandoned dream, creeping further and further, taking over more space in my mind.
These marks of decay have become my only guide, the only thing I can look to in the stillness of the night. They’re the only sky I know now, the only version of heaven I can believe in. My eyes trace the lines over and over, following them like roads on a map. I search for a way out, some kind of escape, but no matter how hard I look, the map always leads me back to the same place—right here, stuck where I started.
