My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

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

Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia.

“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.

Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing?

there was stability in living in the past.

These paintings are about what we sleep through while we’re reading books our teachers give us. We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit about who we really are. These paintings are deliberately boring.”

Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed.

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