My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories.

It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere.

There was a red velvet bow tied around its little bouffant hairdo. Suddenly, a feeling rose up in me. I tried to squash it down, but it nestled into my bowels.

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.

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. I’d

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.

I almost deleted the message, but then I thought I’d better keep it, and let my mailbox fill back up, so nobody could leave me any more voice mails.

What I guessed was pork fried rice was actually slippery lo mein jiggling around slivers of carrot and onion and dotted with tiny shrimp that made me think of pubic lice.

I knew it would be Reva calling to make sure I understood about the funeral, wanting me to promise that I’d be there for her, that I’d show up on time, and to confirm that I was so terribly sorry about her mother’s passing, that I cared, that I felt her pain, that I’d do anything to ease her suffering, so help me God.

I imagined Reva would gasp if she saw all the food I was throwing out, as if eating it all and vomiting it back up wasn’t just as wasteful.

Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world.

I wasn’t bruised or broken. I knew where I was. I had my credit card and keys. That was all that mattered. I wasn’t ashamed. One Infermiterol had taken days of my life away. It was the perfect drug in that sense.

Her eyes filled with tears. It always impressed me how predictable Reva was—she was like a character in a movie. Every emotional gesture was always right on cue.

‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’ That really hit me, ‘everybody’s favorite.’ Because it’s true. I do feel the pressure to be like that. Do you think I’m like that? I guess I just never felt good enough. This is probably healthy for me, to have to face life now, you know, on my own.

Pondering all this down in Reva’s black room under her sad, pilly sheets, I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense.

I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, 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.

“Go get my wife,” he said to the nurse. When my mother came in, he pressed the button on his morphine drip. “Any last words?” my mother asked. “I hope this was all worth it,” he replied. For the rest of his life—around four hours—I sat on the chair and cried while my mother got drunk in the kitchen, ducking her head in every now and then to see if he was dead yet. Finally, he was. “That’s it, right?” my mother asked.

“It’s not about the men,” she said. “Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.” “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.”

the space between us filling with tangled ribbons of pale blue smoke from her Virginia Slim, her saying not to open a window because the wind would mess up her hair.

I sensed that Peggy wasn’t very intelligent, and that my mother didn’t really like her. But Peggy offered my mother a lot of pity. And my mother loved pity.

“Oh, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry.” Peggy sobbed and embraced me. “You poor thing. You poor dear little orphan.” Unlike my mother, I hated being pitied.

“Good-bye,” she wrote, then gave a list of people she’d known. I was sixth on the list of twenty-five.

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.

That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good. I might as well have hired a prostitute, I thought. That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies.

This would be the end of our friendship, I felt. Sometime soon, my cruelty would go too far, and now that her mother was dead, Reva’s head would start to clear of its superficial nonsense. She’d probably go back into therapy. She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me. She’d send me a long letter explaining her resentments, her mistakes, explaining how she had to let me go in order to move on with her life. I could already imagine her phrasing. “I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me”—that was language her therapist would have taught her—“which is not a criticism of you.” But of course it was about me: I was the friend in the friendship she was describing.

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.

“I’m not making any resolutions this year,” Reva said. She turned down the volume on the radio and changed the station. “I can never keep my promises to myself. I’m like my own worst enemy. What about you?”

We watched the rest of the porn movie in complete silence. After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. “Procreation,” I thought. “The circle of life.” During the blow job scene, I got up and peed. During the pussy-eating scene, Reva got up and puked, I thought.

“You know you’re my only single friend?” Reva asked in response. “I wish I had a big sister,” she said. “Someone who could set me up with somebody. Maybe I’ll ask my dad for money to pay a matchmaker.” “No man is worth paying for,” I told her.

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’d always preferred a septic hotel bar, maybe because that’s where Trevor liked to take me. He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”

One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.” I remembered the tick of the clock as they stared. “I guess that’s enough,” said the professor, finally. I was permitted to take my seat. Out the window of the classroom, flat, wide yellow leaves fell from a single tree onto gray concrete. I dropped the class, had to explain to my adviser that I wanted to focus more on Neoclassicism, and switched to “Jacques-Louis David: Art, Virtue, and Revolution.” The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.

At eight forty-five, I called and said, “I need some financial advice. Actually, I’m serious. I’m in a bind.” At nine o’clock, I called again. He answered. “What do you want?” he asked. “I was hoping to hear you say you miss me.” “I miss you,” he said. “Is that it?” I hung up.

She was just as good as a VCR, I thought. The cadence of her speech was as familiar and predictable as the audio from any movie I’d watched a hundred times. That’s why I’d held on to her this long, I thought as I lay there, not listening.

my bones digging hard into the sagging cushions, my throat itchy and sore, my heart racing and slowing at intervals, my eyes flicking open now and then to make sure I was really alone in the room.

I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little.

Let them go, I told myself. Besides, two Benadryl were a joke. Like blowing a snot rocket at a forest fire.

Reva nodded sincerely. In that moment, I think our friendship ended. What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me. I felt a kind of peace about Reva seeing her off that day. I’d cost her so much dignity, but the bounty she was now shoving into the trunk of the cab seemed to make up for it. I was absolved. She gave me a hug, kissed my cheek.

ON FEBRUARY 19, I stared into the mirror. My lips were chapped but I was smiling. Two syllables chimed in my mind and I wrote them down on a Post-it for Ping Xi: “Lip balm.” “ChapStick”: strawberry, linoleum, pay scale, sundae, poodle. And then, another Post-it note: “Thank you.”

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