My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan.

but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.

“Do you really need talent?” That might have been the smartest thing Reva ever said to me.

Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going.

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

Education is directly proportional to anxiety,

It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body, like sneezing or shitting or bending at the joint.

but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.

I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.

the clitoris “works,” but not quite patient enough to really interact with mine successfully.

“That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?”

“Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading

thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook.

So funny

The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked.

And he knew how to manipulate me—I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it.

freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic—I

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

prefer ‘night vision log.’”

I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter.

but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived.

We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la

“Other,” I said. “Do you have a family history of nonbinary paradigms?”

This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life.

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

But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air.

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

hugs. I felt like a praying mantis in her arms.

felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me.

and what’s the use in speculating so let’s remember the good times—at least she’d lived at all.

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.

illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

Sometimes friends are better than family, because you can say anything. Nobody gets mad. It’s a different kind of love. I’ll really miss her.” She

The spirit never dies, and that’s the truth.”

“Your phone is in a Tupperware container floating in the tub,” Reva yelled from the bathroom. “I know,” I lied.

After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. “Procreation,”

Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to.

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.

everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow,

“We were just discussing feminist performance art as a political deconstruction of the art world as a commercial industry,”

can’t get past the context of the art history classroom,” a Barnard girl said.

One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.”

Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company.

Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.

I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it.

northeast corner of the living room, where my desk used to be.

as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.

Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.