My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

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.

In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead.

“No, no, nothing like suicide. I was just philosophizing, yes,” I said. “Just thinking too much, I guess.” “That’s not a good sign. It could lead to psychosis.

Like the nostalgia for a mother I’d seen on television—someone who cooked and cleaned, kissed me on the forehead and put Band-Aids on my knees, read me books at night, held and rocked me when I cried. My own mother would have rolled her eyes at the thought of doing that. “I’m not your nanny,” she had often said to me.

There was no shortage of psychiatrists in New York City, but finding one as irresponsible and weird as Dr. Tuttle would be a challenge I didn’t think I could handle.

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.