My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

They’re the sort of guards who have so much muscle that they have muscles that don’t even have Latin names, because back when people spoke Latin, idiots as big as this didn’t even exist yet.

No price tag, no art, oh, what a relief!

When they talk about the very best investment in the whole church, they point at one painting and say, “The One of the Sea,” as if that’s all it is: blue and expensive.

Because the newspapers say that the artist is a drug addict, that he’s in such bad shape that he no longer goes out at all, so if the buyer is really lucky, he might die! Imagine what the painting would be worth then!

Her husband, an old man with a watch the size of a grown turtle and pants so tight his butt looks like it has its own butt, doesn’t even look at the painting, he just reads the sign next to it to see the estimated auction price.

It’s so beautiful here, the sun shines every day. Miss you, see you soon. —Mom.

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.

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young. There is art that can be so beautiful that it makes a teenager too big for her body. There is a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it is almost unbearable, your soul seems to kick its way through your bones. You can see a painting, and for a single moment of your life, just for a single breath, you can forget to be afraid. If you’ve ever experienced that, you know how it feels. If not, there probably isn’t any way to explain it.

Because it isn’t a painting of the sea. Only a damn adult would think that.

The only things that should be new are sports cars and hip joints.

Lady, Louisa thinks, if I’d wanted to destroy the painting, this entire building would be ashes by now. I’m insanely good at destroying things, lady. Everyone I love dies.

If you’re five years old when your parent leaves you, the leaving didn’t happen on one particular day, it happens every day.

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

Adults will never understand that, because they don’t laugh at farts, and how the hell are you supposed to trust the judgment of someone like that with something as important as art? They’ve never loved anything so much that it’s worth being beaten up by a guard just to get to see it once in your life.

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.

Joar was good at mending engines, because in them he could always see what was broken, but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts.

Joar replied calmly: “When we’re grown-up, I don’t think we’ll all be alive.” Not to brag, but he was right about that too.

She was the best at nearly everything, and she was my human. She was MY human, she was my HUMAN.

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

The artist didn’t know it then, but that was how he would eventually paint Joar in the picture: his outline blurred, as if you were always on the point of losing him. 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.

That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.

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.

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.

“Don’t hurt yourself!” he makes her promise, and that’s the most loving thing any adult has ever said to her.

He thinks about being best in the world at disappointing everyone, because it so quickly becomes impossible to say no to people who are always reminding you of how grateful you should be.

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.

Ted takes his hand gently and promises: “On your gravestone I’m going to write: ‘I love you and I believe in you.’ ”

I HATE SAD QUEERS

“Don’t cry for me, Ted. I got to experience everything. It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it I got to see something unbelievably beautiful.” Ted nods disconsolately. “That girl’s paintings?” “No. You. I got to see you.”

FUCKKKKKK

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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.

AIDS epidemic

There Ted lies beside the love of his life, and the love of his life isn’t afraid, or angry, or even lying in a hospital bed anymore. He is lying on a pier in the sun, with salt water on his skin and Ted’s kisses on his eyelashes.

STOP THIS BULLSHIT IMMA CRY

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

The sound that follows contains a fair number of complicated words of the sort used by people who are too posh for ordinary swear words.

“If you were his friend, I’m sorry. Because the whole world lost an artist, but you lost your human. And I’m sorry you had to share that with the rest of us. You should be allowed to have your grief in peace.”

artists during the aids epidemic

“Aren’t you rich?” she exclaims, glancing at his clothes, as if everyone with clean pants must be financially independent.

And oh, how the artist was taught, because the world has spent thousands of years practicing how to puncture the lungs of children who are different.

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.”

Ted? He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die. That’s a terrible burden for a person. Your shoulders creak, your skeleton shrinks, in the end you can hardly walk.

She casts a final glance at him and says: “Don’t hurt yourself.”

Typical Fish humor, to come back as a cat.

Art is context. Because honestly? It isn’t a great painting.

Because for him, art was love. Grief. A story. A context.

In their world it isn’t the artist who should be admired, it’s the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value. That’s why the children on the painting are so important that they’re protected by guards, but the children on the pier in real life could die without anyone even caring.

he was shy and broken, and the buyers loved that, the more broken the better. Break some more, they wished, go to pieces in front of us!

He didn’t know a damn thing about art, his hands just drew for the same reason that some feet dance: they don’t know how to stop.

The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time, because that meant darker jealousy and deeper paranoia and more empty bottles.

So the artist lived in constant fear that one day Joar would love someone so much that he would end up in prison.