My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young.

The secret to that is knowing that you don’t mean anything to anyone. That you’re worthless.

The woman pretty much has the emotional range of a lampshade.

effrontery

Art is empathy.

Fish had to explain: “Inform the relatives” meant that you told the people who cared. So Louisa was the relative. “Deceased” meant dead. “Substance abuse” meant her mother had drunk herself to death. Drowned from the inside. A child’s brain is so imaginative, Louisa heard this but didn’t grow up afraid of alcohol, just horribly afraid of swimming.

She cried when she realized that she was a person without memories,

Imagination is a child’s only weapon.

This is a painting of laughter, and you can only understand that if you’re full of holes, because then laughter is a small treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, in an entirely different childhood, there was a big sea. The sun shone, the summer was endless, and out into the never-ending clear blue water stretched a fishing pier, and at the end of it sat the best sort of humans. They were fourteen years old, almost fifteen, and not to brag, but Louisa was right: it really was the most excellent fart. One of them let it loose and the friends almost fell into the sea with laughter. That was the moment that became the painting.

If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it.

They had one summer on that pier twenty-five years ago which felt like it was going to last forever, because that’s how all summers must feel when you’re about to turn fifteen,

If you only get a few summer days like that you’re truly lucky, if you only find one friend like that you’re insanely fortunate.

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

“Are you… dying?” she asks, because he actually looks like he is, as if he might get blown apart if the wind changes direction. He nods again, but he only looks sad because she looks sad. With a voice full of solace, the man says, out of nowhere: “Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.

In the fullness of time the artist would find a way to paint laughter, make everything beautiful, because that was how he wanted to remember those days when they were fourteen. Because there was beauty too.

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.

Joar didn’t know how to whisper, You can paint whatever the hell you like, as long as you paint, I’m just scared I’ll lose you if you don’t. The artist had no words either, because he didn’t know how to explain to Joar that his anxiety made him feel like he was drowning. That he was so scared that if he held on to his friends’ hands, he would drag them down into the darkness with him.

They knew each other without words, and sometimes that was unbearable. One day the teenagers would sit in a painting, but that day they were sitting on the edge of a pier, in the longest silence any of them could ever remember existing between them. That was why it was so liberating when one of them suddenly farted.

Everyone dies, of course, every single person, but very few get to understand that they’re dying.

our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety.

And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

“Run, Louisa! I hope you learn to swim. I hope you paint every single wall from here to the sea. Now, run!”

He’s never been able to explain that all his paintings are an attempt to show how beautiful he wishes he actually was. He’s dreamed of being able to say: “Being human is to grieve, constantly.” Because what he really wants to know is: “How the hell do all the rest of you cope?”

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young, art that is a joy so overwhelming that you almost can’t bear it. How sad it must be, the artist thinks, what an immense loss for anyone who never gets to experience this.

He had a huge apartment full of beautiful things until very recently, but he sold everything to buy something else. That was what the box was for, the one Louisa saw behind the trash can. But the artist wasn’t dirty because he was sleeping outside, as Louisa thought, he was only dirty because a fairly crazy girl had collided with him and he had landed on the ground, and the ground happened to be made of dirt. It wasn’t his blanket lying beside the trash can, and it wasn’t his cat either.

The eyes are all that’s left of the person he used to be, the illness has aged his body to that of an old man, but the eyes are still those of a mischievous little kid: playful and loving and dazzling and entirely impossible not to fall in love with.

grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe.

Ted takes his hand gently and promises: “On your gravestone I’m going to write: ‘I love you and I believe in you.’ ” “I love you and I believe in you too,” the artist smiles, resting his head heavily on Ted’s arm.

In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.

You don’t wish for happiness when you have lost the love of your life, because you can’t even imagine ever feeling happy again. All you wish for is peace, calm, a long night’s sleep. You dream of nothing but being able to forgive time for making us old. For not letting us stay on a pier with our best friends. For letting summers end.

The fact that Joar was capable of loving anyone at all after that was incredible. That he could love anyone the way he loved the artist? A miracle.

That was why Joar had decided to enter him into that competition, and also why he always wanted Ted to bring cookies each morning. It’s hard to say “I love you” when you’re fourteen years old. And completely impossible to dare to whisper: “Don’t hurt yourself, because you’d be hurting me too.”

All his childhood the artist had seen adults destroy their surroundings, some with violence and others with silence,

Joar smiled dreamily and said: “I’m going to have a normal life. I’ll work in the harbor. Get up every morning and feel like shit, be angry all the fucking time. But every so often, on a fucking Sunday, I’ll go to some museum somewhere. And deep inside, there’ll be a painting by a world-famous artist, and it’ll be so beautiful that I can cope with being alive for one more week.”

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.

They giggled, danced, made food, and read poetry out loud to each other. That lasted several months, a handful of moments, an eternity. Then the artist got sick and Ted stayed. In twenty-five years of friendship, they only lived with each other for four: two years as teenagers, two years at the end. But if you don’t believe that boys’ souls can be connected across a great distance, you know nothing about them.

The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes. Ted read Bodil Malmsten: “There is no death, only a lot of dead.” Then he read Joan Didion, about her first memory of coming home from the hospital after her husband died: “I remember putting his cell phone in the charger on his desk.” Then he read Bodil Malmsten again: “That is what death is, that you are never answering again.” Then he read Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”: Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Then he read Bodil Malmsten, over and over again: “The heart is always unguarded.” He fell asleep in the chair and when he woke up, the artist was gently holding his fingers.

They stare at each other, the thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old, with funerals in their eyes. It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else.

“Maybe Joar was bigger in the painting because that’s how you saw him. Fish felt big to me, even though I was much taller. People think it’s bad if someone makes you feel small, but it really isn’t.” Ted doesn’t respond. He just looks down at the box of ashes and concludes, however much it annoys him, that the artist was right. She’s one of us.

He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn’t quite know how to say that.

“He said he was all the rest of it, everything around us, the water and the air.” “He was the light,” Louisa whispers. Ted thinks once more that the artist was right. One of us.

They were also laughing hysterically now. Only then did Ali look out at the first row of the audience. There sat her friends. Joar, Ted, and the artist. Wearing dresses. They had run home and borrowed them from Joar’s mom’s wardrobe. Obviously all the dresses were too big, because all the boys were too small, and they would be teased about it every day for the rest of their time at school. Joar would get into so many dress-related fights when spring came that the principal might as well have moved Joar’s desk into his office. Joar didn’t care. It was worth every blow if Ali realized she wasn’t so damn alone, at least not all the damn time. Who gets a friend like that? Hardly anyone.

“You’re probably right,” Ted whispers to Louisa on the train. “She said she believed in us, never that she loved us, because that meant more to her than love.”