GCSE Descriptive Writing

The Soliloquy

TRIGGER WARNING- Euthanasia

I wrote this soliloquy in year 9 but I always really loved it. It is written in a shakespearean style and in iambic pentameter. It is about a girl who's best friend is gravely ill and has asked her to help her end it.

[Appearing on stage, holding up a bottle of pills. We see a girl in a hospital bed behind her]

O, what a request, what a choice to make!
How can I be thinking of obeying,
Of serving her detestable desire?
Appearing under a fictitious name,
I attained this bottle and God, O God!
See what power it alone possesses,
What heinous cursed power trembles within.
Such like a poisoned snake writhes in my hands,
This snake that rattles from the threats it holds,
Squirms desperately between my taut knuckles.
Threats that can be taken so easily,
Swallowed in such fatally large doses,
Just as she intends, O, abhorrent snake!
How can I even be contemplating,
Accepting this odious arrangement?
How could anyone even benefit,
From my uncertainly-made conclusion?

[Starts to pace the stage]

My morals, my ethics, and my conscience,
My pride, my pain and her pain together,
To end hers at the price of fuelling mine,
To end her suffering with this bottle.
I can watch, with my hand over her mouth,
As she floats into a peaceful abyss,
Finally set free, finally content.
But again, where does this result leave me?
I shall be stuck in this hideous cage,
Still treading the same infectious waters,
And still churning the same bedevilled earth,
Under my hopelessly determinded feet,
I shall be trapped as always before this,
But now without the single thing,
That motivated me to continue.

Does it matter? She can live through neither.

But what can I, my selfish self, live through?
Can I stand the bitter pain of her death?
Her suicide? Or in truth, her murder?
Can I attempt to handle the knowledge, that I was the demon to condemn her?
Can I even begin to bear the guilt?
The insufferable sight of her parents,
Standing over her body, and the wake,
Forever incessantly wondering,
What would drive their child to leave them this way?
Why must she be set to sleep deep in the soil?
Eternally cursed to deathly slumber,
In a closed wooden box lined with white silk,
Suffocating from the blossom-topped lid.
For while I watch their tears dry on their cheeks,
Can I, in my sin, endure knowing that,
I came to this liscenious decision?
That my blind foolish soul hurled from the cliff,
Just to leave her standing, tranquil but dead,
A cold, lost corpse that I can never hold,
In my guilty hands, hands smeared in her blood.
To help take her life could be a blessing,
Or a conviction to the threat of hell,
Taking it, this will leave me incomplete,
But saving it, this will leave her empty,
An empty, broken, useless life; A waste.

[Walks over to the hospital bed]

We can all agree that this will not be,
A light or amicable decision,
But a waste of life is not worth living,
And to take it, to assist in her death,
With no matter of my own reluctance,
Will set her loose from her life long shackles,
For I am too foolishly immoral,
And I care too much to watch her suffer,
So I am prepared to pay the high price,
For her imminent release into death.
God knows, if I've the chance to relieve her,
From the constantly unbearable pain,
She's been forced to endure her entire life,
Then I know, in my stubborn fortitude,
That I will not regret our decision.