THE COMPANION a monologue in rain.

Scene: A room without walls. Rain falls beyond the edge of everything. The air is heavy. The sky is fighting itself. A woman sits, watching. Another presence — the Companion — sits beside her, silent but near.

SELF
The rain has been falling for days.
The earth is saturated.

I feel saturated —
as if something ancient is beginning to rise from the soil,
something I buried long ago,
believing it would never return.

I sit and watch the rainfall.
I watch others.
And sometimes…
I watch myself —
interacting with others, with life, with the rainfall.

There’s a darkness beside me.
She hasn’t said a word.
But I feel her.

I get lost in the sound of raindrops,
in the light trying to break through clouds —
like the sky itself can’t decide
what it wants to feel.

COMPANION
You buried me.
But I never left.

SELF
I know.

COMPANION
Do you think of him often?

SELF
Yes.
(It doesn’t matter which him.)
They all haunt the same hall.

SELF (trying to deflect)
Why do you still come around?

COMPANION (laughs — a sound like something breaking and something remembered)
Because you’d never move toward the light
if I didn’t exist.

(Silence. Rain.)

NARRATION / STAGE DIRECTION
She does not comfort.
She does not destroy.

She simply is —
the weight that makes me crave flight,
the chill that teaches me to kindle fire.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai