My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“He used to say that art is coincidence. A beautiful painting is the sum total of a person, what has happened to them, blessings and curses alike. Coincidences.”

Every time Joar defended the people he loved, he got hurt worse and worse, love would be the death of him one day. So his friends begged him to stop. Which forced Joar to be creative.

“Because I was afraid I’d cry if I told the truth.” “What would you have wanted to say?” “I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people.”

“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,”

Ted looks at his watch, for the first time in his life he wants time to go faster, only someone who still has all their people left wants to stop time.

“Look at that happy idiot!” Joar grinned. “When he’s happy, the whole world is… good. When he draws, everything is… damn, then everything’s good! That’s why I have to protect you, Ted. Because the only thing I can do is fight, and when he’s grown-up he won’t need me anymore. But he’ll need you.” Ted had never heard anything more ridiculous in his whole life. “Why would he need me?” Joar turned and said: “Because loyalty is a superpower.”

Because that day when Bulldog was shut in the locker and the janitor had to cut the lock off, the janitor’s sleeves slid up, revealing his tattoos: skulls. That was the first time Joar saw them, and he would never forget it. Because without the janitor, nothing would have turned out the way it did. When you’re fourteen years old, a single person can be like wind beneath a butterfly’s wings. “Art is coincidence, love is chaos,” Ted says.

his face is as red as a priest in a brothel.

“Little brat,” Ted grunts. “Miserable old man,” she grins.

Art is a nakedness, you have to be free to decide when you’re comfortable with it, and with whom.

Then Ted explains just how bereavement feels: “I could never have lived there without him. I would just have lain awake all night waiting for him to come home. I would have had to throw away all the eggs, because he was the only one who ate them, but I would have forgotten not to buy them. I would have forgotten that he didn’t exist, all the time. I would have gotten angry because the light in the bathroom was turned off, because I used to get so annoyed with him for always leaving it on. I would have saved all his shoes, all his shirts, and I would have been angry with the spring and hated flowers when they appeared because they drowned out the last smells of him. I would have always laid the table for two on the balcony. I would have had to eat all the popcorn myself. I would never have been able to pick a film.”

“I could never have lived there on my own. I would have frozen to death in that apartment without his eyes on me.” Louisa pulls her jacket around herself more tightly and whispers: “That’s exactly how it feels.”

The janitor had grown up feeling lost and different, rejected at school, never normal like other children. But his mom always reminded him: “You feel strange because you still have your wings, rubbing beneath your skin. You think you’re alone, but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’ And then you won’t feel lost anymore. You’ll realize that you’ve always been able to speak a secret language, one that has no boundaries, because you have no nationality. Art is your homeland.”

“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”

Great art is a small break from human despair, she explained to her son. It took him twenty years to understand what she meant.

It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp.

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet… but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.” The boy hesitated for a long time before saying: “I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things. There’s something wrong with my brain.” “That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied. Then he quoted Frida Kahlo, who said she painted flowers so they wouldn’t die. And Leonardo da Vinci, who said that art was never finished, only abandoned. The sound of the doors being unlocked inside the boy then should have been heard around the world, the ground should have shaken, that’s how much everything changed inside him. They went on painting the wall until the sun abandoned them.

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

Ted looks out through the train window and sees a whole life. It’s strange what our memories do to us, editing our feelings.

that was how the artist decided to paint them, not the way they looked, but how they made him feel. He decided to call the picture The One of the Sea, just to tease Ali, because she really did think it should be called The One of Ali.

“He carried on painting those skulls, because then it felt like Christian was still alive in his fingertips. Perhaps it’s like that for you too. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

“I didn’t know I took up this much space in your brain,” Fish had said. “You’re everywhere in my brain all the time,” Louisa had replied.

Then they lay on the floor and Fish read out loud, because her favorite thing in the library was the fairy tales, but Louisa’s favorite thing was Fish’s voice.

“You mustn’t be frightened of death, Giant!” Fish had said when they had almost reached the foster home, and then she had pointed at the sky: “Look at the sun, do you get how crazy it is that it rises every morning? Do you get that, Giant? How crazy it is that we are here?” Then Fish had growled and howled and made faces at Louisa to show how insane it was that a human being could do all that, how impossible a body is. “Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”

The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.

He had engraved all their initials on the back: Joar’s, Ali’s, Ted’s, and his own. So that they would always be with him.

Her talent for switching from defense lawyer to prosecutor in an instant really is unsurpassed.

The artist used to sit in a big window in his apartment looking at the people down in the street and muttering: “The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything that’s keeping us alive, but we’re still here?”

“How can there be enough room inside a person for something this beautiful?” the artist had whispered once when they were listening to Maria Callas.

People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted’s brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions. Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to “make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

They had been telling the same silly, silly jokes since Joar was little. In a way, it was their equivalent of Joar and his friends calling: “Tomorrow!” A gentle reminder that they still had each other, in spite of everything.

There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway.

But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”

“I just mean… maybe you got the room in the basement so you wouldn’t see how sick your dad was the whole time? And how sad your mom was? And maybe your mom was trying to protect you from your big brother?”

Ted explains that children know hardly anything about their parents, even if they live with them their whole lives. Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.

“That isn’t a job,” his brother replied calmly. He meant “for us,” that it wasn’t a job for people like us, Ted realized that. Their dad had worked at the factory, just like their mom, to give their kids a better life. Trying to be a musician, following their passion, that sort of thing was for parents who only wanted to give themselves a better life.

that he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

But now they were alive forever: Joar, Ali, Ted.

It is probably never easy for anyone to return to the place where they grew up, there’s no way to forget who you are there, no matter how hard you’ve tried to become someone else. But for Ted it’s impossible to come home now, he realizes, because home was the people.

That last summer as children only lasted a few weeks, but it will carry on inside Ted for his entire life. Time weighs more when you’re little.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.

Louisa peers at Ted: “What did you call him?” “I hardly ever said his name,” Ted says quietly. It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?

she thinks about Fish telling her what evil among men is like: It’s like water being heated up a little at a time. It gets worse and worse, but so slowly it’s hardly noticeable, so everyone can convince themselves that it’s probably normal, until we’re all boiling.

And Ted thought about how life is so fragile, coincidence decides so much, it takes so little to change everything.

He had always assumed that her goodness made her light, and the world isn’t built for light people, the planet spins and they keep getting thrown into walls and fists. But now he and everyone else could see the truth: it was his old man who was tiny, his mother was the giant.

“Damned if I know… I don’t even think all the people who go to church every Sunday believe in God. I think they just need company. To feel that they belong to a group.” Kimkim nodded gently and replied: “But I don’t think that means that God doesn’t exist, Joar. I think maybe that’s what God is.”

One small victory against the universe, things like that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Joar spins his coffee cup for a long time before he replies: “You’re the happy ending.” “What?” “Kimkim gave you the painting because he saw you paint. You’re the happy ending to his story. The life you live from now on. Everything you paint.”

She said people like her and me couldn’t be with each other, because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.” “But you never found anyone?” “I never looked.” “Was Ali your first love?” “My last.”