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.

They’re painted as if the artist saw them so intensively and dreamed them so beautifully that he learned how 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.

Everyone he met said he ought to be so grateful, because his life was every artist’s dream, and he felt ashamed, as if he had grabbed the wrong coat from a cloakroom and was wearing someone else’s dream.

his parents were often told their child wasn’t normal. They believed that, sadly, which is why they missed out on the incredible joy of having a child who was special.

If a homeless man in the street had tried to sell the painting of the children on the pier, it would have been worthless, but once it was hanging on a white wall in a beautiful gallery, it cost a fortune. When sufficiently wealthy people want something bad enough, it becomes invaluable, because then art isn’t experienced through the eyes, but by the ears, they’re not paying for a picture but for its name and history. 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.

Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.

But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

“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.”

But Dad once told me, when he was really fucking drunk, 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.”

And then Joar sits there under the stars and he too loses Ali all over again. That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.