Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

He felt a flash of familiar shame—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.

We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.

This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room.

His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars. Hamlet died at the end, of course.