My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

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

“You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted. “Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up.

Something flashed in the gloss of my eyeballs. I got close up to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.”

sent them down the garbage chute.

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.