Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?”

Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

if you only have nightmares then are you just poisoned forever?

Made from dust, returned to dust.

remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

That was how the world worked. Mercenary. Nothing to be done about it.

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

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

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

Dying. It feels like such a throwaway to just die for no reason. To waste your one good death.”

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.

The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death. As if continuing to live was a given, inertia that needed to be disrupted inorganically.

his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

“Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?” “Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.” Cyrus laughed.

But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?” When he hesitated, she said, “It matters to me. Know that. It matters deeply.”

He’d picked up two coffees along the way, the second as a little offering for Orkideh, a small gift to communicate that he’d been thinking of her before he saw her.

“but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”

The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet.

He tried to reconcile the words he’d just heard with the image of the man he quietly loved, the gentle writer with whom he’d spent years swinging from joy to joy, despair to despair.

Nights of weeping in the moonlight because it was so beautiful to love and feel the world as deeply as they did, so unexpected and rare.

“inside my heart is a little man with a broken heart.”

our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.

But Orkideh was Orkideh right up until the end. Still herself. That’s luckier than people realize.”

“She lived for something. And she knew when she was done living. That’s not nothing.”

If so much of my language is junk, both the language of my speech and the language of my body, it seems like a not insignificant portion of my living must be doomed to junk.

Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.

“Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you.

Sobriety meant Cyrus couldn’t help but see himself, eventually. And it hurt. He was repulsed by what he saw.

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.