WHITE OLEANDER (opening monologue)
“Everybody asks why I start at the end and work back to the beginning. The reason is simple, I couldn’t understand the beginning until I’d reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing; too much you would never tell. I could sell these things, people want to buy them. But I’d set all this on fire first. She’d like that! That’s what she would do! She’d make it just to burn it. I couldn’t afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky has ever been as clear or as sharp as when I belonged to her. I don’t know how to express, that being with someone so dangerous, was the last time that I felt safe. The Santa Anna’s blew in hot from the dessert that Fall. Only the Oleanders thrived. Maybe the wind was the reason my mother did what she did. If it was, I wouldn’t have known - I lived in her shadow then. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I know that everybody thinks that when they’re small, but she was the most beautiful woman most people had ever seen. He came into our lives without a warning. She ignored him at first. He wasn’t her type. We laughed about him – his persistence. “Never let a man spend the night,” she said. “Never apologize. Never explain.” She was breaking all her rules, and it would change everything!”