My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

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.

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.

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.

Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because 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.

That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness. The vibration of his laughter, the smell of his skin, his phone number. How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

Until then he hadn’t known that grief is physical, an abuse of the living.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,”

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

Because adults like him don’t understand that adults have to be adults so that children can be children.

“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.”

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

The janitor looked ashamed at that, sometimes you don’t appreciate your own blessings until you see the envy in someone else.

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.

It’s strange what our memories do to us, editing our feelings.

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.

She hands him one. So they sit by the sea with the painting, each with a cigarette under their nose, a mild breeze in their hair, and the first light of morning on their cheeks.

“Anyone who hasn’t seen real violence probably won’t understand that, but the minutes between the beatings are the worst,” Ted says, there on the rocks.

Sometimes we remember the last moments before a great catastrophe as more beautiful than they actually were.

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.

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.

Disappointment is a powerful thing. Used correctly, it is stronger than fear, more terrible than physical pain, if you see it in the eyes of the one you love, you’ll do almost anything to make it stop.

So every time it happens now, every time I see him out of the corner of my eye, I whisper: ‘Peekaboo.’ ”

That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.