My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

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.

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.

We’re a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety. The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning?

Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives.

grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death. Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault.

When a world-famous artist dies, phones ring on every continent, people talk about him on the news, people who have never met him cry. Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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.

And Heaven laughs. Oh, how it laughs.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice, no bitterness. It had been a long life. Wild and precious.

My art is only an investment now, everyone who owns a piece of me hopes I’ll die, because nothing is more valuable at auction than an unfulfilled life.”