Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave.

“Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

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 first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other.

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis.

“Orkideh—Roya—used to say there were only two kinds of people in any relationship, the feeder and the eater: the person who wanted to give care and the person who wanted to be taken care of.

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