Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

‘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.

She tried not to think about the people she was leaving. She’d earned that. More than earned it. She refused the hot knot of guilt rising up in her throat. You will not be needed, she said to it in her mind, swallowing. So much could still go wrong, of course, but for the first time in as long as she could remember, she could inhale fully, feel the air filling the bottom of her lungs. Even this, breathing, felt freighted, suddenly more meaningful, the way money means more to the poor than the rich.

Why are you so relatable?