Romance in a Society of Ghosts

The martyr does not endure.  His is an end that is relatively quick, even despite the thumbscrews, the rack, the pincers glowing with heat pulling and snapping.  But the end always looms for him; soon enough, he dies.  Saint Stephen the Protomartyr was stoned.  Saints Philip and Jude the Apostles were crucified.  Saint Bartholomew was crucified, but first he was flayed alive.  Michelangelo granted him and his emptied skin immortality upon the Sistine wall. 

The emotional martyr dies a thousand times before lowered into a shallow grave or fed to the dogs or scattered pell-mell into the spring wind.  Succored by treacherous hope, he dies, and dies, and dies yet again, and the lesson dies with him each time.  He lives in a beachfront shack, thankful for the ten seconds of shade a tsunami provides.  He stands in his own way, his feet frozen with fear, unable to countenance that monstrous specter of success.

May has been cold, and its rain colder.  I don’t remember much of it, but I do recall wiping away a tear with a clumsy, water-wrinkled thumb.  She thought me unhappy, and convinced herself of the blame.  As her mascara streaked black down her cheek, I fancied it both a badge of courage and a bit of war paint.  Where does this cycle of martyrdom dovetail with self-defeat?  When does one realize that martyrdom self-inflicted is thinly-veiled suicide?  And when does one accept it for the self-indulgence that it undeniably is?  Self indulgent self-defeat self-inflicted, and all redundant.

We were already soaked, so I pushed her into the lake.  I threw myself in, too, if only to even the score.  As I walked home alone, I felt a bit like the undead, pallid with the downpour, counting the sidewalk slabs like wasted days.  In a society of ghosts, romance is but a half-memory.  The spirits may be happy, but only in hindsight.

"You step in front of it," I explained, my voice hoarse and my eyes downcast.  "You hear the gunshot; you smell the sulphur; you feel the round before its auguring tip touches that scrap of skin that never could keep your heart contained."  I sighed, blinking back the tears, wincing as my eyes burned in their own salt.  "You step in front of it, and you hope, over and over again, that it is a blank.  You know it’s not a blank–there exists no reason, in this world or the next, for the bullet not to tear a swath of carnage through your faltering chest."  She wasn’t listening anymore, but I finished anyway.  "You step in front of it, and you hope.  And each time for the first thousand times, you even thank the gun for the chance to have done so."