My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

“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.

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

“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.