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“DESIRE: Trust me, if you reject love long enough you’ll forget how to accept it.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“UNREQUITED LOVE: Look, you see me, a lonely girl having a drink. What do you do?
LOST: Avoid eye contact at all costs?
UNREQUITED LOVE: Oh come on, don’t you ever randomly flirt and find yourself falling in love with attractive young women?
LOST: I’ve forgotten how.
UNREQUITED LOVE: How peculiar.
LOST: (Struggles, trying to find the right words.) No…I mean I did once, but I’ve forgotten most things about love I guess. It just comes with the territory of losing your heart.
UNREQUITED LOVE: Wait. (Beat.) You lost your heart?
LOST: Yeah um...I lost my heart about a year ago. Filed a police report and everything, but they haven’t had any luck finding it.
UNREQUITED LOVE: But without a heart, how can you-
LOST: Love? I can’t.
UNREQUITED LOVE: Can you remember what love feels like?
LOST: (Shrugs.) Vaguely, but for the most part I don’t remember much about it. Like when couples hold hands, I don’t understand why they do that.
UNREQUITED LOVE: Must make for some lonely nights.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“UNREQUITED LOVE: Some days my body feels empty and I feel like an idiot. To care for someone with every inch of your soul, and then find out they couldn’t care less about you... It’s like being slowly stabbed in the chest by someone who enjoys murdering the innocent.
LOST: But you always seem so happy.
UNREQUITED LOVE: There’s only so much you can’t feel.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“So here it is: A month of heartbreaking, gut-wrenching work that, if we do it right, leads to no definite conclusion. Eighteen-hour days and eighteen-hour nights. For you new members, this will feel like some kind of endurance race.

We’ve got one month to break down this awful script, rebuild it, learn every one of its variations, and then rehearse the result until you can do it in your sleep.

But even then we won’t be finished, because there’s a hostile crowd out there just dying to be the first ones to solve the mystery—which we will not let them do.

Let’s get to work.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe

“UNREQUITED LOVE: Metaphorical symbols weigh more than the average human being.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“GUARDED: Love is too powerful. You can’t build up a tolerance to it.
SILENCED: I think if you expose yourself to it then you can fight it off more easily. Maybe kissing is, ironically, a kind of immunization. I mean I’m no doctor but isn’t that how shots work? You’re exposed to the germs so your body can fight them off?”
― Alyssa Ahle

“GRIEF: How can you let someone go when you’ve already spent so much of your life with them? It just doesn’t feel natural.
DEPENDENCE: I don’t know. I guess you just do it.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“HEARTACHE: The doctors told me in so many medical terms that the shock had cracked my heart vertically down the middle. That there was nothing they could do. That any more shock could cause my heart to break in half. I didn’t want to believe them so for the past year...I’ve seen more doctors than I can remember. I’ve tried all kinds of medications whose names I can’t even pronounce. I take so many pills I could run a working pharmacy out of my medicine cabinet right now. (Beat.) But nothing is working. It’s like my body doesn’t know how to not be sick. I don’t even know if I can heal, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be healthy, to feel normal.
DESIRE: Because no one’s found the cure for a broken heart yet...”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“SILENCED: I don’t trust someone that doesn’t drink.
GUARDED: And I don’t trust anyone who does.
SILENCED: Touché́. (Takes a huge sip of her beer.)”
― Alyssa Ahle, Lost and Found: a stage play

“If there is only shadow on a theatre stage, that play will be boring; if there is only light on a theatre stage, that play will be boring! What makes the play interesting is the struggle of shadows and lights with each other!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“RONNIE: Yes, but first impressions are not always right.

HUGO: Has that been the case with people you’ve dated?

RONNIE: I don’t know. In most cases I’ve never given it the chance to go further than my first impression.

HUGO: Because you see everything after.

RONNIE: Yes, the first impression is always overpowered by the potential future I see afterwards. So I don’t focus on it. There’s never been a first impression that made me want to stay.

HUGO: What if I asked you to stay? Just to see what will happen.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“MAN: I’ll just circle back the way I came. I’m really sorry to have bothered you. (Starts to leave.)

WOMAN: Who are you looking for anyway?

MAN: (Hesitates, not sure if he should tell her.) Um…my soulmate.

WOMAN: (Instantly serious.) Oh.

MAN: Yeah.

WOMAN: No wonder you need to find them.

MAN: How mad do you think they’ll be?

WOMAN: That you got lost? I think they’ll understand.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“MAN: But this isn’t a fantasy. This is really happening.

WOMAN: What’s happening is that you’ve been misled by the idea that two people can fit perfectly together without their inherent flaws driving them apart.

MAN: I don’t think that.

WOMAN: Really? Then what do you think?

MAN: I think a soulmate is someone you fit imperfectly together with, someone who sees you for who you are and loves you for it. Someone whose soul complements yours.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“AARON: Sorry. Look, maybe we can still salvage our time together. Maybe I can help you figure out why I don’t want to be with you this time.

IVY: What is this world coming to? I can’t even get lucky in my dreams.

AARON: Come on…you know you’re curious.

IVY: Fine. Let’s have at my subconscious.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“ETHAN: Wait, please don’t tell me you actually sell love potions. That violates consent.

CASHIER: No. We don’t sell them, and we never will, but there will always be those that think we do. Those are the ones we have to watch out for, the ones who want to possess others.

ETHAN: I see.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“CASHIER: You’re aware of the side effects of an anti-amour, right?

ETHAN: I’ve heard rumors.

CASHIER: They’re all true.

ETHAN: Wait, it actually dries up your heart?

CASHIER: Partially.

ETHAN: What?

CASHIER: Well, this tonic works the opposite way a regular one does. Instead of restoring, it destroys. When the anti-amour goes in to “cure�� you, it kills a part of your heart in the process. Then there’s the other tradeoff.

ETHAN: Which is?

CASHIER: The pain will go away, but you’ll find it difficult to love as easily or strongly in the future. That leads to a new kind of pain, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

ETHAN: I don’t think it could be any worse than what I’m feeling right now.

CASHIER: That’s what I said before I took it.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“MAYA: I like your glasses.

GARRETT: Thanks.

MAYA: Could you take them off?

GARRETT: You just said you liked them.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“HUGO: If people knew the risks, they wouldn’t date.

RONNIE: Exactly. Which is why I don’t.”
― Alyssa Ahle, Five Short Plays of Magical Realism

“To crudely paraphrase a far more elegant apology than ours: Piece out our imperfections with your mind; think - when we speak of whale-boats, whales and oceans, that you see them - for 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our stage; jumping o'er time; turning the accomplishments of many years into an hour-glass...”
― Orson Welles, Moby Dick - Rehearsed

“She was young, not so much older than me
A career girl in a little soignée suit and hosiery
Just recently engaged
She'd leapt from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building and
crash-bam-slammed
into the roof of a shiny black Cadillac
Which now gathered her into its folds
It looked like somebody popped open a ring box
An expression of pure bliss gleaming on her face
A nun's ecstasy, her first and final orgasm
A perfect ending, handed to the world in white gloves.”
― Phoebe Eaton, Best Women's Monologues of 2019

“Listen, shit gets ripped off at hospitals all the fucking time. I mean Jesus, who wants to work in a hospital? The money sucks and it's boring and disgusting and you can get attacked with like, staplers, because people are genuinely off their rockers, and if I tell anybody something's wrong—any little, the slightest nothing, anything—the whole entire desk gangs up on you like you're some traitor to their mind-blowing incompetence. By law, they have to call the police and file a report. It's a whole thing, a giant hassle, and they all hate you 'cause it means tossing the cells, it really is like jail only everybody knows it's somebody on staff, and that gets them extra table-flipping pissy because it's this big hot steaming pile of extra work for nothing!”
― Phoebe Eaton, The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2021

“Times and expectations don't change, they just get a facelift.”
― Alyssa Ahle, You, Yourself, & Others: A Short Play