In borrowed lives, acting to have a death that means more than the anonymity my father knew at his end, than the sea of anonymity my mother drowned in. I play my part before you, helpless by design, I’m biting back desire. I gaze at you, doctor-- you may see a patient, but this body’s a pyre. So don’t talk to me as if I am a complacent thing that only needs a line from your well-weathered, hollow-worded script. Don’t talk to me with cool apathy, as if I’m blind to my own dying. I’m not. I’ve seen it before. “The last time I thought I wanted to die...” I almost took my own life, watched it drain from me like the ninety-five percent I poured upon myself-- Ever clear, doused but paradoxically dry, craving the catch of fire but fearful of being inextinguishable. Filled with contradictions, juxtapositions, and a superstition that “A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief.” So even if I went back inside, dried the body meant to be set on fire, meant to be a pyre, A meaningful death I’d be denied, consigned to living a myriad of lives, only to die a Martyr(!) Quoted lines from Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf, 2024).
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