Monroe Castillo.
Fuck it, another red carpet picture. Why was Monroe torturing herself like this? She’d had nothing to do with the movie or the production, so it made no sense that she was scrolling through her phone and looking at all the happy faces. If anyone knew they would say it was because she wasn’t over her ex who was front and center with his new significant other on his arm. That wasn’t the case, she
was over him. Sure, she missed the good times, but his hatred and vile comments towards her made any lingering feelings vanish into thin air.
“How’s life in the gutter?” was his latest text to her, which she didn’t bother replying to. Yes, their breakup had been nasty, but she felt his cruelty was completely unjustified. It’d been
three f***ing years. “I can’t do this anymore!” She snapped as she tossed her phone from her hands and onto the floor. If it cracked or broke, so be it. She needed something to keep her off social media, she needed to disconnect. She couldn’t even turn on the television anymore because there her ex would be in a film trailer or an interview. He was Hollywood’s new IT Boy, while she was a has-been singer. She’d won multiple awards and sold out stadiums, but no one seemed to remember that anymore. All they cared about was her fall from grace; the former superstar who had the world at her feet until she posed nude and her handsome boyfriend kicked her to the curb.
Part of her hated his success more than she hated him. He’d risen just as quickly as she’d fallen. He was an up and comer when they were involved. She helped him get auditions and was happy to do so. She’d never forget how excited he’d be to bring home a new script and to go over it with her. They'd had a blast acting out the parts and he always wanted her input on how he could improve on his craft. It meant the world to her that her opinion was so important to him. She was a singer, not an actress, but he took her advice to heart whenever she would give it. How had things gone so wrong?
That f***ing magazine. It’ll boost your career, they said. It’ll let people see another side of you, they said. She shouldn’t have listened, she should have known better. All it did was cost her the man that she loved and the career that she’d worked her ass off for. The aftermath plagued her nightmares and replayed in her memory like a box office bomb. Her boyfriend saw the photos and was horrified. “How could you not even ask me how I’d feel about this?” She remembered him screaming as tears rolled down her face, eyes filled with regret. Perhaps they could have gotten past the pictures, but she’d also bragged about their sex life in the interview, too. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the final mail in the coffin. He quickly packed his bags and slammed the door behind him, never to return again.
She lost her endorsements and her concert sales tanked. The woman who once packed arenas was now forced to perform at small town fairs or worse, shady dive bars where every smelly trucker had seen her naked photos and jerked off to them nightly. Her next album flopped with the singles not even cracking the top two hundred. She had become a joke in the industry and even in her own fandom. “I can’t believe I once looked up to this whore.” A former fan posted on her official website, while another one added, “her boyfriend knew when to run and so do I.”
And that boyfriend, her ex, rose like the sun. Offers poured in for him while hers dried up to little or nothing. The breakup didn’t even seem to faze him as he moved from little known television star to big man in Hollywood. Supporting roles turned into starring ones with him center stage at every major league event; the ones she had formerly been invited to or at least asked to perform at. Her nights were spent at home with a bottle of cheap wine while his were spent hobnobbing with the elite. “Remember what it was like at the top?” was the first text he sent after to her their breakup. She was shocked and wasn’t sure how to respond until his next appeared on her alerts; a photo of him next to Martin Scorcese with a pen and a contract in hand. “You bastard.” She spat as she gritted her teeth, wondering why he was being so vicious.
It was at that moment that she first turned to drugs. She raided her medicine cabinet for any old prescriptions to find solace in. Some helped knock her out and sleep away the pain, but others did the complete opposite; keeping her awake and away from the nightmares of her fall. Either way, they helped her to cope or at least to mask the agony she endured every time she saw her ex on television or she walked down the street and heard the whispers from someone who passed by.
“Remember Monroe Castillo? I went to a concert of hers in high school, wasted my money on a lousy t-shirt that I couldn’t even give away at a garage sale. Heard she’s living in a beat up trailer park somewhere, not that anyone cares. Her ex-boyfriend though? Everybody says he’s on his way to an Academy Award. Funny how things change, huh?”
