Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

I’d say, ‘You can take twenty years off the end of my life if you stop making the ones I have so miserable.’ I don’t even know what I was so sad about. I had friends. I wasn’t hungry. But the rot just sat in my gut.

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

Roya knew she would never be able to be the sort of mother her own mother had been, the kind who quivered with love like a wet branch. Even as an adult, Roya could hardly be bothered to feed or bathe herself.

He started having sex, smoking cigarettes. 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.

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

It was as if his body was obstinately trying to reclaim the waking it had lost while Cyrus was drinking.

Stories are the excrement of time.

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.

A martyr wears simple footwear, he thought to himself.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

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 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.

Most people understand not wanting to die for a country you no longer recognize.

Somehow the idiot zealots ended up with all the guns, tanks.

You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit.

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

The fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice alone was almost worth the cognitive dissonance.

They found it impossible to describe their relationship to others without over- or underselling the kind of intimacy they shared. So they didn’t try.

an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room.

sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

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.”

Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

“You know not everything is connected, don’t you?” she said. “Everything doesn’t have to stand in for everything else?”

I wore gold jewelry that warmed in sunlight. I made my friends smile. I did not linger to see what my enemies did.

I knew the badness for how different it was from the goodness.

When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always.

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

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