Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

“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.”

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?” asked Roya.

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

“That difference was tragic to you, to your dad, to your families.” “Sure, sure, but that level of tragedy wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire. Meaningless at the level of empire is what I mean by meaningless.

Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

Before addiction felt bad, it felt really, really good. Of course it did. Magic. Like you were close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash.

That stuff is only interesting to those blessed with a rare cosmic remove from knowing actual addicts. Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

Martyr. I want to scream it in an airport. I want to die killing the president. Ours and everyone’s. I want them all to have been right to fear me. Right to have killed my mother, to have ruined my father. I want to be worthy of the great terror my existence inspires.

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David.

“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”