Eileen

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I was someone else. I was Eileen.

Icicles hung from the rafter over the front door, and I stood there imagining them cracking and darting through my breasts, slicing through the thick gristle of my shoulder like bullets or cleaving my brain into pieces.

I looked like a shy and gentle soul from afar, and sometimes I wished I was one. But I cursed and blushed and broke out in sweats quite often,

That is what I imagined life to be—one long sentence of waiting out the clock.

That was how I imagined my anatomy back then, brain like tangled yarn, body like an empty vessel, private parts like some strange foreign country.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

Such is the life of the self-obsessed.

Back then, at twenty-four, people already considered me a spinster.