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.

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 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.

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

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.

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.

They have never met, but it doesn’t matter. Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

with the sort of friendship they had, there was never a “before.”

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

“I’m not worried you’re going to die. I’m worried about you being dead. I’m worried about being alive without you.”

Not many people are blessed like that, with as many giggles and chuckles as he was in his final weeks, with the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him.

It’s strange, the things you remember from your childhood, but perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.

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

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

“Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”

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.

It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?