Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

The standard bouquet of booze, weed, cigarettes, Klonopin, Adderall, Neurontin variously throughout the day.

he’d sell his plasma for that much, twenty dollars a trip, his dehydrated hangover blood taking hours to sludge out like milkshake through a thin straw.

It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision.

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

“Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

You can keep being the sad sober guy in Indiana who talks about being a writer, or you can go be one.”

that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

For all his oscillating between self-loathing and self-pity, Cyrus always seemed sincerely joyful at his friends’ most banal successes. Even then.

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.

He tried not to think too much about these contradictions.

His rent was cheap, he had friends, there were books he was excited to read. But some days, that all felt so abstract as to become totally meaningless. Cyrus often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled. Some nights he’d lie awake till morning, frightening sleep away with the desperation of his wanting it.

Orkideh’s words: Another death-obsessed Iranian man. The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death. As if continuing to live was a given, inertia that needed to be disrupted inorganically.

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. Five years after a revolution led by students and idealists, pacifists with hyacinths in their breast pockets. How did this happen? Zealots. Guns, tanks. And now, war.

It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.

But he’d never been one to let his beliefs get in the way of a buzz,

So common you forget how pretty they are. Like pigeons.

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win.

That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

Martyr. I want to scream it in an airport. I want to die killing the president.

“This whole wanting to die bullshit,” Zee went on. “It’s so fucked up.” “How do you mean?” Cyrus asked. “I mean what I said. This ‘poor little orphan boy with nothing tethering him to this world’ shit.” Zee looked sharply at Cyrus. “You know I have your cum on my chest, right? Like, right now this second? While you opine about how nobody will care if you kill yourself?”

“Cyrus, for months, every song I’ve listened to has been directly about me. About my life. And my stupid fucking life with you. Every flower has been blooming straight into my fucking face. Do you know what that is? It’s like being insane. Like the fucking pigeons are speaking to me. Have you ever felt that? Do you have any idea what I’m even talking about?”

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.

We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.

Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.

But the dictionary didn’t prepare me for how much junk there was inside the language. How I could say “water”? or “Please, can you give me a glass of water?” and they’d be, for all intents and purposes, the same. Or just so subtly different that I could never hope to be able to learn the difference.

Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky.

How negligent Cyrus had been with Zee’s loyalty.

Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee, Cyrus suddenly realized.

“It reminds me of this one Milosz poem,” Cyrus said. “ ‘Those expecting archangels’ trumpets and locusts and horsemen will be disappointed,’ something like that. I’m probably bungling it.” He slipped his hand into Zee’s and squeezed it tightly. Zee kissed him on the cheek.