“The Sticky Drawer”
Jordan is clearing out a late parent’s apartment before the keys are due back. Alone in the emptying rooms, still half-arguing with the parent who is gone, they open one last drawer — and everything they thought they knew changes.
I found the good scissors. Forty years you told me there was exactly one pair in this house worth touching, and they were never where you said. They were exactly where you said. I owe you an apology, and you had to die to win the argument.
The building wants the keys by Friday. So here I am, with a roll of trash bags and thirty years of you, deciding what a whole person comes down to.
You were not an easy person to love out loud. You never said the soft stuff. You said, “Did you eat.” You said, “Drive safe.” You said, “Text me when you land.” And I spent a lot of years wishing you would, just once, say the other thing instead.
And then I opened the desk. The sticky drawer — the one that never opened. And it’s full. Every report card. A ticket stub from a play I was a tree in, I was nine, I had no lines. A birthday card I mailed you that I don’t even remember sending. You kept the envelope. You kept the envelope.
You were saying it the whole time. I was just listening for the words, and you were doing it in receipts.
Okay. The scissors are coming home with me. The rest can go. But I’m keeping the scissors, and the tree ticket, and — I think I’m going to be so much sadder tomorrow than I was ready for. Bye. I ate. I’ll drive safe.
How to Play It
Objective: to finally understand a parent they could never quite reach — to settle the argument that death interrupted. The listener is the absent parent, and the whole speech is still trying to reach them.
The turn: the sticky drawer. The complaint (“you never said it”) collapses when the evidence of love turns up in kept receipts. The ending echoes the parent’s own plain phrases back — that’s where the grief finally lands.
Written gender-neutral — swap “parent” for your own read (mother/father) and it plays clean. Don’t start sad; start almost wry, even irritated, so the drawer can genuinely turn you. Let the last three short sentences be small; the smaller they are, the bigger they hit.
Who it suits: any actor, 20s–40s, who can carry a slow build and a quiet landing. A flexible two-minute contemporary dramatic piece that reads as fresh, unindexed material.
Want Will to Coach You Through It?
A monologue is a two-person scene where the other person never speaks. Working it 1-on-1 with a working actor is the fastest way to make it land.