Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

I never really loved being alive. It’s hard to get there without some sort of distance. Hard to describe the shape of a cloud from inside the cloud. Like how I would appreciate gravity more if I’d had trouble floating off in my teens.

Cyrus read on a website once that there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

“Of course,” said Orkideh. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

I want to be worthy of the great terror my existence inspires.

He tried to put it into language, tried to salvage some kernel of the feeling to write down later. But all he could think was “inside my heart is a little man with a broken heart.”

You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.