Dear Pelagia

From Aphos

Context for performers: This monologue should be performed to a camera. It is an unknown amount of time in the future. You can hear the bobbing of rubbish choked waves. Hadal (Hae-dal) is recording a message for her estranged daughter, Pelagia (Pae-laj-aea). She is working on her final project: a submarine that does not rise. Imagine her very sunburnt, wire thin, in her late middle ages or older, dressed in the tattered remnants of a sea captain’s coat, her hair wound with plastic jewels and small bones. In the wake of total environmental collapse, Hadal once led a cultish following of survivors to an immense floating island of plastic rubbish that had collected around an abandoned oilrig in the deep Atlantic. But following the collapse of her kingdom, she has been abandoned and subsisting alone for many years. Hadal believes she can hear mer-people in the water who have guided her decisions. It is unclear if this is a mysterious species of sapient sea life or if she is just delusional. 

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HADAL :  Dear Pelagia. I am recording this for you because it is your birthday, because they reminded me it was your birthday and that one should send ones daughter a special message for her birthday. So. Happy Birthday. And now I don’t know what to say. Oh, I do have a surprise for you: I’m working on the submarine. I know, it was always our special thing, but you were so smart, you made the plans so easy to follow, I’ve even been able to make some changes of my own and- well. Nothing has changed. Things stay the same here at the end of the world. Now it is always summer, always the sun, in a sky empty and starched. Everything reeking of gulls and salt, you remember. This land is sewn with calcifying things that do not live and so cannot die and so float here at the edge. Floating here with them gives me plenty of time to think. The sunsets are lovely. Sometimes I find something the boat people like amongst the bottles and bags and in return they give me clean food and promise to pass my messages along to you. But lately they haven’t been coming. I don’t blame them. They’re scared of me, which is good, for I have grown weary of eager subjects. But there is one bit of good news. Really you wont believe me, but Pelagia: The singers in the sea; they’re back. I’ve started hearing them again: whispering out of the cracks in the ocean’s oil bright skin like they did all those years ago when I first brought everyone out. But they did not abandon me. They came back. But I suppose they are more forgiving than either of us. It was when I was burning all the calendars. You see, I had decided to stop counting the days. It was a mistake. The counting. You count towards something. Something arriving. Or leaving. Or changing. Numbers imply future. Back before you were born we would all count down. We kept counting down expecting there to be... this moment. A definite, palpable exhalation of relieving breath. The point where we could turn to each other and nod and say: “See? Is this not exactly what we all saw coming all along?” And we would sit together and listen to the echo of that stone we’d dropped so long ago finally hitting the bottom. We all knew that someone, at some point had definitely dropped a stone, and all that remained was to wait and see just how far down the pit really went. So we waited, and waited and we gave each other knowing glances that said: “Soon.” and, “Wont this be something to behold?” ... I think, eventually... we lost count, or forgot we’d dropped the stone, or thought maybe there’d been no stone in the first place. But we were still waiting because by then we did not know what else to do, because we’d promised, promised ourselves that we would be here for the end. I built our kingdom out of that promise. I settled my followers upon the plastic shores, sat my throne beneath the rusted pumps and proclaimed myself prophet queen of this rig because I knew; I knew that when it all came plunging down, I would be the one to tell the story. But the story never ended, and now it’s just me left. Except that, as I was sitting on the deck watching the ash of all these days rise to meet the sunset, I heard them whispering, leading me down the paths we trod together to where the plastic is still loose and you can fall through if you aren’t careful. I looked down in to the murk and I saw them. They were there Pelagia, the fish with faces. They sung to me of finishing the submarine and then we sung you a happy birthday. Because truly we do care about you. Pelagia... I’ve waited and waited but I realise now that the world is never going to end. Not for a tired woman with no subjects or heir. The story was never about us in the first place. That’s what they were telling me all along. So I’ve made up my mind: I’m joining them. They’ve been there from the start, gazing up as we crawled out of the darkness and in to the burning sunshine before plunging back. Waiting for us to finally drop the stone... You know, Pelagia, I think I’ve finally settled on a name for our submarine. Anyway I had better get back to it, need to allocate rations and I promised myself I’d get around to stripping out the ballast tanks today. It’s almost finished Pelagia, almost finished. You would be so proud. Your mother, always. Hadal