My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

So Louisa kept it. Imagination is a child’s only weapon. And on the back of the postcard of the painting, Louisa wrote a message, the one she would have wanted, as if she had been longed for and loved: See you soon. —Mom.

Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

How could the sea be big enough to have room for their hearts? Incomprehensible.

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.

He’s almost forty years old and he’s lived a long life, remarkably long, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. He has seen the world, fallen in love on white beaches, danced to loud music on warm nights, and wasted slow mornings under soft sheets. He has painted and giggled and sung. All the things he never dared dream about when he was fourteen and had cuts on his wrists and pills in his backpack. He has lived, dear Lord, how he has lived.