DANIELLE CHELOSKY / BREATH PLAY
1
I text you: i’m about to commit a felony...
tell me i’m hot. I look at all of my things
and wonder how I will ever move out.
nothing makes me happy anymore except
for cigarettes and touching myself to porn
that always degrades the woman. on the phone
my grandma says with an innocent
laugh, you’re not much of an eater, right?
my closet is overflowing with clothes
even though I only wear the same five
shirts. while I’m using my vibrator, Costar
sends me a notification: Give yourself a
facial. I can’t buy a pack of American
Spirits without the man at the gas station
asking me what weather I prefer. I don’t
know why I always lie. to spice up my
forms of self-destruction I buy a $16
burrito from Chipotle and eat it in two
minutes. you text me back: what did you do?
2
you take three trains to come see me. a playlist
titled wine drunk in suburbia materializes and I
vacuum for the first time in years. fantasizing
about picking you up at the train station millions
of times and then suddenly I am in Bethpage inhaling
smoke and pulling up next to you. a kiss through
the window in the 7-Eleven parking lot. you are
clad in all black, headphones around your neck,
I can hear the echo of a song. at my house, we make
progress with this bottle of wine like it’s work we
have to finish. cigarettes on my back porch, arguing
about something, our love language. a canceled order
of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye off Amazon;
you beg me to use eBay instead. later I explain the
plot of a book to you and realize as I’m talking that
it’s not that interesting. “how many books are just about
monogamy not working?” I mutter. you say: “around as
many as there are about it working.” wet walk to pick up
beer, a pack of IPAs that stay in my fridge for weeks.
3
everyone online thinks I’m like 26 or 27
and every guy at the gas station when I
try to buy cigarettes thinks I’m 17 and
they feel the need to tell me that smoking
is bad for you. lately falling asleep has been
like trying to come; it takes time and
concentration. a phone call at 2pm, SPAM
RISK, from Peekskill. hello, can you hear
me? a woman whispers on the other line,
her voice nearly drowned out by background
noise, like children chattering. I cannot bring
myself to say yes. I hang up. mental breakdown,
first of the year. can’t stop creating, look, I’m
doing it right now. I swore to you that I probably
left my mom’s womb already writing something
and I meant it. sometimes I wish the flow of words
would pause. last night I couldn’t fall asleep until
about four in the morning. woke up at ten, faintly
remembering a dream about biological warfare. I
looked my old best friend in the eyes and saw betrayal.
dreams are often saturated with inexplicable energies,
and she radiated pure evil in a way I can’t put words to,
it was just obvious, the kind of thing you sense.
4
last night before I fell asleep I typed into my Notes app:
beautiful sunsets that have the texture of the end of the
world. I dozed off into a dream about murder; I lived
in an apartment complex and watched as my neighbor beat
a man to death. I didn’t know who was safe to tell, I didn’t
know where to go. I woke up around sunrise, surprised
by the violence of my own brain. I fell asleep again and
entered a new dreamland where the sun was descending.
I decided I had enough time to take a walk through the park.
suddenly I was treading across a tightrope to an island
and everything was drenched in a lethal red, as if the world
were on fire. a voice somewhere said it was the kind of color
to get laid down and fucked on. it sounded like it was
coming from above, a god narrating the apocalypse.
Danielle Chelosky is a New York-based writer with work in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit, and Rejection Letters.