Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.”

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,”

Because it feels different than nothing. Which is all sobriety is. Nothing. Nothing in every direction. It used to be I’d only feel something if it was the most extreme ecstasy or the most incapacitating white-light pain. Drugs and booze sandpapered away everything else. But now everything is in this textureless middle.”

“You know what Borges said about fathers and mirrors? They’re abominations. They both double the number of men.”

It was like being born—there were so many feelings he’d never felt. He’d wasted years with meditation and chamomile. There were all these seasons nobody even mentioned. New wets, new warm soft heats. He wanted to live in them all.

whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it. She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’

“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.”

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.

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