My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

“Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats.

😐

“That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?” He didn’t speak to me for weeks.

Stretch marks, loose skin, scars across her belly she said looked like “a raccoon had disemboweled her,” glaring at me as if I’d wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck on purpose.

“Let me be dumb,” I said, glugging the NyQuil. “You go be smart and tell me how great it is.

“I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ‘night vision log.’”

But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

“Don’t be that way,” Reva crooned drunkenly. “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?” “Someone who liked fucking corpses.”

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.

It seemed that while I was sleeping, some superficial part of me was taking aim at a life of beauty and sex appeal. I made appointments to get waxed.

Hahaha hahaha hahaha WHAT

Then one day I woke up to discover that I had dug out my digital camera and sent a bunch of strangers snapshots of my asshole, my nipple, the inside of my mouth. I’d written messages saying that I’d like it if they came and “tied me up” and “held me hostage” and “slurped my pussy like a plate of spaghetti.”

😨

I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash.

Try a hot shower and some chamomile tea. It should settle you down.

I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite. 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.

She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her “culture.”

Talk about a personal culture.

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

I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.”

Feels like that sometimes. Being shamed for not being a walking social cue.

That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies.

I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.

He could keep his flabby old vagina lady and her retarded kid.

Even if he is an asshole, the protag is a SHIT HEAD. 😭

“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.”

No words.

solipsistic terror.

This needs googling. lmao

Did you know that cows can choose to sleep standing up or lying down? Given the option, I know what I’d pick. Have you ever made yogurt on the stove? Don’t answer that. We’ll save the cooking lesson for our next meeting.

This psychiatrist is actually fucking insane.

Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn’t hit. These weren’t my memories.

“I really identify with the Chinese kid,”

Reva's last words.

Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,

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