Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

I want my life—my death—to matter more than that.” “You want to be a martyr?” Gabe asked, raising his eyebrows. “I guess. Yeah, actually. Something like that.”

“That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.

“We have difficulty seeing our present selves in history the same way we view our past and future selves. That’s all I’m getting at.”

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

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

there was no ethical consumption under late capitalism and sometimes, Cyrus figured, one had to pick one’s battles.

So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else.

I made my friends smile. I did not linger to see what my enemies did.

I used to walk with a sprig of lavender in my pocket—smelling it I could go to almost any other point in my life, which I believe was as close to time travel as anyone’s come. I’d like credit for that.

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