Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

everyone and their mailman believes they’re an unacknowledged genius artist. What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence?

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”

People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist.

Painting saved me, but I can’t say I loved painting. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

Except when Sang asked me to show her a painting, I had one. When she’d asked to see the paintings in my apartment, I had dozens. I’d worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings. I’d chopped tomatoes and peeled half-eaten onion rings off plastic trays for thousands of hours. I’d painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping.

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