My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

She worshipped me, but she also hated me.

Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.

I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.

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.

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 rather eat shit than have to work for that cunt one more day,”

get. 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 didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it.

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.

‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’

but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering.

And I wanted a mother. I could admit that.

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.

It made me a little jealous to think of Reva being depressed and dependent on anyone but me.

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.

My blind eye was the one real comfort I felt I could give her.

Sometimes friends are better than family, because you can say anything. Nobody gets mad. It’s a different kind of love.

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.

holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.”

I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts.

Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend? Could she really dispose of me so easily?

there was stability in living in the past.

I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.

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