Short story / screenplay

Hi, this is one i've been thinking of for a while, i've worked on it intermittently but have been snowed under with college to really add much on.

I see it as a short story or screen play. The music is important to the scene as I see it, and all the music is by Irish artists. (It's set in Ireland)

This is, I suppose, the opening monolgue if you'd call it that, semi autobigraphical.


Would appreciate some feedback, Thanks.

Scene 1: A flat, a man stares in the mirror, a look of disappointment or disgust in his face, looking around he sees some child’s toys which belong to his daughter. Grabs his keys and walks out the door.
(music: What happens when the heart just stops – The frames)

Dialogue spoken:
I always liked sunsets more, some people look for a message in that, like some sort of symbolism and how sunrises are a new beginning and a sunsets the end of something. I don’t see that....it’s just dramatic, the colours are more spectacular, blood reds, deep purples and all kinds of pink and orange, just altogether more dramatic, sunrise starts and end with dark then light, though in fairness I’ve never seen a beautiful one, maybe they do exist.

If you asked someone else, someone that knows me they’d probably tell you I could do with a few more sunrises, more new beginnings and less dramas.

Áine liked sunsets too, she’d take a million pictures and it’d drive me mad, she maintained she liked sunrises just as much but her passion for photography never drove her so far as to actually rise early enough to capture one.

Áine was as much a “high school sweet heart” as I had, though she didn’t realize it at the time. I was awkward at school, not so much a misfit but in so much as I didn’t have a specific place. I played sports, played in a band, hung out with nerds and even some pretty girls who were for the most part platonic friends. But Áine was the one I was interested in, I’d even gone so far one night to consume a large bottle of cider to get the courage to ring her up and ask her out. She said no.

And that was as close as I came to having a high school sweet heart, my love, or at least my infatuation, went unrequited.

I had other girlfriends throughout school and afterwards, but this infatuation carried on, so it’s not fair to say that I was ever 100% into the person I was with, I was always going to give Áine one more chance to be with me.... and then it happened. One Christmas kiss led to other things and at last I was content, this is what I’d wanted all along, 8 long years of not really moving on.

So what went wrong? A beautiful daughter outside of marriage wasn’t the disaster it used to be, not even in catholic Ireland. If anything this gorgeous girl with Áine’s smile, Áine’s eyes and perhaps unfortunately my nose (although it’s only marginally bigger than Áine’s) brought us closer and gave us a reason to stay close. The fact that we’d never gotten round to saying I do though made it easier to walk away. And that’s what I did, the going got tough and I walked away.

When you walk away from the love and support of a good woman you inevitably end up on your hole. Anything I’d managed to succeed at up to then was because of her, the constant pushing in the direction of my choice, which I, for some reason, always resented led to the few successes that I’d actually achieved. So without that push, that encouragement, I fell into a rut. Drink, mainly, women if the opportunity arose, and the odd drugs binge, but mainly drink. A nothing job in a petrol station, the embarrassment of trying to explain where it all went wrong when a familiar face from school that I hadn’t seen in ten years dropped in.

For a brief moment I had what I’d wanted, what a lot of the boys at school wanted, because it wasn’t just me that had that infatuation with Áine. Then there was the explaining to some tool that I hadn’t seen since school that yes, I‘d had that, and I ****ed it away.

There’s a song, with a line “I wouldn’t swap the pain, for never knowing you” that brief moment was worth all this. This heartache, this pain, the feeling of uselessness, that love makes this just about bearable. Just about.