My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I was just trying to pass the time.

I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was.

He was kind of a nonentity, I thought, a stranger gently puppeting his way through his life at home with two strange females he could never hope to understand.

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

I think that bothered Reva more than anything. She must have felt that I was cheating in the game of skinniness, which she had always worked so hard to play.

You seem to think you have a lot of problems. And I just don’t get it. You’re a smart girl,” Reva said. “You can do anything you put your mind to.”

it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

I could have acted out if I’d wanted to. I could have dyed my hair purple, flunked out of high school, starved myself, pierced my nose, slutted around, what have you. I saw other teenagers doing that, but I didn’t really have the energy to go to so much trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

“Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”

We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say.

“You’re still obsessed with Trevor, aren’t you,” Reva said, slurping from her can. “I think I have a tumor,” I replied, “in my brain.”

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

I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.

Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.

I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it.

We split the rest of the M&M’s and watched a show about the Bermuda Triangle and I ate some melatonin and Benadryl and drooled a little.

She would have been prettier if she knew how to relax.

whore to feed me lullabies.

Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

It wouldn’t be that bad to die,

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street.

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.

Harrison Ford was my dream man.

I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep.

Poor Kurt Cobain.

Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

That was the best way to die—awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. I could take the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean.

I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts.

Plus, I’ve always wanted to work in the World Trade Center.

O dear

“Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want.

“Do you think he still loves you?” “I don’t know.” “Do you wish he did?” The answer was yes, but only so that he would feel the pain of me rejecting him.

He couldn’t resist me when I was weak.

“This Bush is so much cuter than the last. Isn’t he? Like a rascal puppy.”

“bloated nymph with dead man eyes.”

Maybe they lived as real artists knowing all along that there were no pearly gates. Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven.