My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.

Girl what

I imagine this is what having a sister is like, someone who loves you enough to point out all your flaws.

“Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain.

???????? the main character is a bitch…

And he knew how to manipulate me—I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it.

Lol

Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.

OH, SLEEP. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.

Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor. I wiped myself and shuffled across the gallery with my pants around my ankles and stuffed the shitty Kleenex into the mouth of that bitchy poodle. That felt like vindication. That was my proper good-bye.

No shame

But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina.

Wtf

On August 20, 2000, I turned twenty-seven

Ofc shes a virgo

He looked to me like a child molester. All those men did.

:0

Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

Oxford.

Babel

still pretty.

All she cares about.

ON SEPTEMBER 11,

Oddly thats today!

There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.