Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?” When he hesitated, she said, “It matters to me. Know that. It matters deeply.”

He’d picked up two coffees along the way, the second as a little offering for Orkideh, a small gift to communicate that he’d been thinking of her before he saw her. This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room.

Cyrus was also aware of the possibility that his marvel at this seemingly mundane phenomenon might be an indictment of his own self-absorption. He hadn’t cured a plague, he’d purchased a two-dollar cup of coffee. This overblown moment of self-satisfaction at what was essentially a very, very minor favor.

He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that.

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

So many of Cyrus’s heroes rebuked abstinence, with its abstract promises of spiritual reward in exchange for corporeal restraint, preferring instead the booming immediacy of physical pleasure. “Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?”

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. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.

A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

I had words—enough to say “please” and “sorry” and “thank you”—all you need in any language, really, unless you’re a philosopher.

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.

“I can’t stand that I’m so mad,” he said, desperately. “You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?” Sang asked.

“You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently. “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”

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.