My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried.

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore. We’d been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I’d let Reva borrow, which she’d promised to dry clean and return but never did.

these assholes think they can go around treating everyone below them like shit. And I’m supposed to giggle and look cute and send their faxes? Fuck them. Let them all go bald and burn in hell.”

“I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.”

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

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 thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

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

Ignorance is bliss

Over the next eight years, Trevor would periodically deplete his self-esteem in relationships with older women, i.e., women his age, then return to me to reboot. I was always available. I dated guys from time to time, but there was never another real “boyfriend,” if I could even call Trevor that. He wouldn’t have agreed to carry that title.

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep.

Gag em liike who's gonna be the boys

I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror.

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.

this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me.

Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina.

“Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.”

LMAO

“Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”

She pulled out a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a can of Diet Mountain Dew from her new huge lime green alligator-skin knockoff Gucci tote. “Want some tequila?”

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’d like it if they came and “tied me up” and “held me hostage” and “slurped my pussy like a plate of spaghetti.”

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. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.

DR. TUTTLE HAD WARNED ME of “extended nightmares” and “clock-true mind trips,” “paralysis of the imagination,” “perceived space-time anomalies,” “dreams that feel like forays across the multiverse,” and “trips to ulterior dimensions,” et cetera. And she had said that a small percentage of people taking the kind of medications she prescribed for me reported having hallucinations during their waking hours. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.”

“My mom is in this cheap little wooden box now,” she whined. “It’s only this big.” She took her hands off the wheel to show me the dimensions, voguing.

Oh, my mother. At her most functional, she kept to a strict diet of black coffee and a few prunes for breakfast. For lunch she’d have Dolores fix her a sandwich. She’d eat just a few bites, and put the leftovers on a bone china plate on the counter—a lesson for me, I took it, in how not to overindulge.

She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.

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.

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.

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 never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people.

The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.

She smelled like shampoo and perfume. She smelled like tequila. She smelled vaguely of French fries.

I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank slate.

Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen.

Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the be...

“Look, I can’t deal with you now. I’ve got to go,” he said and hung up. That was fair. He could keep his flabby old vagina lady and her retarded kid.

“If you’re not over here fucking me in the next forty-five minutes then you can call an ambulance because I’ll be here bleeding to death and I’m not gonna slit my wrists in the tub like a normal person. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna slit my throat right here on the sofa. And in the meantime, I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him I’m leaving everything in the apartment to you, especially the sofa. So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer.”

neurocircuits. It’s really a matter of listening to your instincts. People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness—because they impair our judgment. Don’t try to think too much.

Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend?

I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness.

If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful.

Is this a cry for help? It’s pretty fucking pathetic, if it is.

Ironic

“I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.

Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity.

The deep sleep I would soon enter required a completely blank canvas if I was to emerge from it renewed.

Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. 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.

It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey.

When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything—the whole world—would be new again.

Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.

At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d wake up with a different face and body and name. I’d appear to be the old me. “But that’s cheating,” he said. “If you’re planning to walk out of here and go back to being the same person you are now, what’s the point?”