My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. 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.

I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air.

“But why do you care? It’s not a contest.” “Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.”

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

there was stability in living in the past.

In the mornings, she prepped and set out into the world, a mask of composure.

The fear felt like desire: suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again.

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness,

Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,

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