Help monologue

HELP

INT: A HOSPITAL ROOM

Hannah, a teenager, is sitting in the bed with her wrists bandaged. She is facing away from her mother, who sits next to her, exhausted.

HANNAH

You don't have to stay here every second of the day. You win. You saved my life. I'm not going to try anything while I'm here.

(Glances at her mother, who doesn't move.)

Hello? Are you even listening to me? Go home, Mom. What do you think I'm going to do? They won't give me anything sharper than Jell-O in here. Just leave me alone for ten seconds so I don't have to have you staring all judgmentally at me.

(No change. Her mother stares tiredly at her folded hands.)

Come on, you've spent a billion hours lecturing me. You convinced me! I was wrong. Life is better than death. I should choose it. I need help. Unless you're worried you didn't make your case strongly enough? Probably because there's really no way to say for sure that life is better than death. Everything we yell about the all the time…we get so worked up about God and death and religion because we have no idea and there's no way to prove it one way or the other.

(Cruelly; aiming to hurt)

You think you saved me but that's just because it's what everyone says we should think. Some cultures worshiped death. Some sacrificed girls just like me and it was supposed to be the best thing in the world. It made their gods super happy. Maybe if I died it would make our god happy. There's just no way to tell. You can look at me like that all you want but it's just society making you think this way, Mom. You don't think about anything you do, you just do it because everyone else does it.

(She can see she's hurting her mother now but she doesn't know how to stop,
so she just turns away.)

Don't tell me you love me. Don't tell me you'd miss me. Everything is falling. We're all falling and pretending like we're not going to hit the ground, but we're going to. All you want to do is prolong the fall, but that doesn't really help. Nothing does.