My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.

I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.

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

Title drop. Slay.

Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.

They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches.

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

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.

“Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will. That must be a painful way to live. Very disempowering,” she said, and burped.

“People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.”

Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth.

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 tried to rub the dirt off the glass, but it was impossible. The dirt was stuck on the other side.

In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love.

kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past.

No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories.

A glacial world.

She left without saying good-bye. I was relieved to be alone again. I got up and went to the bathroom and

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.

What’s more dignified than the ocean?

The sadness was just floating around in the air.

Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing?

found more pills under the sink in a wicker box with a pink ribbon tying the lid shut—an Easter relic, I guessed.

nothing but white walls, bare floors, lukewarm tap water.

In this way, I could stay in the black until my year of rest was up.

I asked for flowers. “Lilies.” “Birds of paradise.” “Daisies.” “A branch of catkins.” I jogged in place, did leg lifts, push-ups. It was easier and easier

But by the end of May, I sensed that I was going to grow restless soon. A prediction. The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in.

The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning ...

suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again. I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind.

There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone.

ON JUNE 1, 2001, I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. Sunlight was needling through the blinds, illuminating crisscrossed planes of yellow dust that blurred and waned as I squinted. I heard a bird chirp. I was alive.

I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun.

I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park. I drank no coffee.

I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of.

I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing.

Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.

Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven. Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lifes without having to swat away any more flies.

Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.

took the letter with me on a walk in Central Park.

Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.

There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,

ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers.

Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone.

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