what you do in your free time

In the interest of keeping busy, you start a blog and type up an exhaustive list of all the dead birds that you look at on your way to work, the pigeons in the underpass who grasp their soft pink hearts like holy ghosts. In the interest of keeping busy, you do your hair, change your clothes, flip through catalogues. Peel tangerines in single unbroken peels. Clip your fingernails. Stop sleeping. In the morning you stand next to your bed and stare at it for ten minutes straight, swaying slightly, fists bunched up at your sides. You break your sugar bowl on purpose, grab carelessly at the ceramic with your bare hands. Don’t worry, you don’t even nick your finger. You just came out of someone’s television, thin black vines of hair are covering your face. You’ve just killed someone’s friend and neighbor, someone’s son and daughter, boo-hoo, you’re falling to pieces, seriously, just look at you!

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar is a 24-year-old writer living in Pittsburgh, PA, where she may be found playing videogames, watching action movies, and squandering her English degree by working a desk job as a secretary at the Allegheny County Office of the Public Defender.