Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

‘You can take twenty years off the end of my life if you stop making the ones I have so miserable.’

Still, however abstractly he envied Gabe’s ability to speak unencumbered by the rhetorical hygienics du jour,

“I expected you to be more surprised,” Cyrus admitted. “My being straight passing or whatever.” “Oh sweetheart,” Gabe chuckled, “you think you’re straight passing?”

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

“Stop trying to make everything mean something,” Lisa said. “Trying to flatten everything to a symbol or a point. The coral is dying because of microbeads in body wash and because of Monsanto and because there’s no reason for anyone powerful enough to do anything about it to do anything about it.”

How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

“Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.”

Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

“See, this is why everyone should just do what I do,” Zee said. “Be right about everything, and shut up about it.”

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