My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.

Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time.

Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born—the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.

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

I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it.

I learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities

I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that 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 that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.