A monologue from the play by August Wilson
VERA (twenty-seven)
It wasn’t nothing to you but it was something to me. To have you just up and walk out like that. What you think happened to me?
Did you ever stop to ask yourself, “I wonder how Vera doing–I wonder how she feel?” I lay here every night in an empty bed.
In an empty room. Where? Someplace special? Someplace where you had been? The same room you walked out of?
The same bed you turned your back on? You give it up and you want it? What kind of sense does that make?
You had what you want and I didn’t. That makes you special. You one of them special people who is supposed to have everything just the way they want it. . . . Floyd.
I wanted to know where you was bruised at. So I could be a woman for you. So I could touch you there. So I could spread myself all over you and know that I was a woman.
That I could give a man only those things a woman has to give. And he could be satisfied. How much woman you think it make you feel to know you can’t satisfy a man?
So he could say, “Yes, Vera a woman.” That’s what you say, but you never believed it. You never showed me all those places where you were a man.
You went to Pearl Brown and you showed her. I don’t know what she did or didn’t do, but I looked up and you was back here after I had given you up.
After I had walked through an empty house for a year and a half looking for you. After I would lay myself out on that bed and search my body for your fingerprints.
“He touched me here. Floyd touched me here and he touched me here and he touched me here and he kissed me here
and he gave me here and he took me here and he ain’t here he ain’t here he ain’t here quit looking for him cause he ain’t here he’s there! there! there! there!
He’s there. In Chicago with another woman, and all I have is a little bit of nothing, a little bit of touching, a little bit of myself left.
It ain’t even here no more, what you looking for. What you remember. It ain’t even here no more.
