My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I asked Trevor once, “If you could have only blow jobs or only intercourse for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?” “Blow jobs,” he answered. “That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?” He didn’t speak to me for weeks.

Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?” “Someone who liked fucking corpses.”

In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love.

I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering.

Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

The lightheartedness in that wish struck me, and for a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.

everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people.

I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose.

He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people.

There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.