My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old.

Wow. First time reading this. It is June and I am 26.

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

She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.

trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful.

Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into.

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

Maybe I’ll ask my dad for money to pay a matchmaker.” “No man is worth paying for,” I told her.

Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness.

She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.

But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death.

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