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.

because rich people are the worst sort of adults, and the worst way to vandalize art is actually to put a damn price tag on it. That’s why rich adults hate the sort of thing that Louisa paints on the walls of buildings, not because they love walls, but because they hate the fact that there are beautiful things that are free.

She doesn’t like her body because there’s too much of it, she doesn’t like her voice because it’s too deep, she doesn’t like her brain because it always tells her to talk when she’s nervous. Most of all she doesn’t like her heart because it’s always nervous. Stupid, stupid heart.

The first time she and Fish met, in a group foster home where no one dared to sleep, Fish had whispered jokes to her all night. Her favorite was: “How do you get a one-armed man down from a tree? You wave at him!”

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.

that’s how all summers must feel when you’re about to turn fifteen, that’s the age when friendship is like joining the mafia: you can’t leave it, you know too much.

Then he asked one of the other fourteen-year-olds: “Do you think we’ll all still be best friends when we’re grown-up?” 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.

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

Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing? We’re a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety. The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die.

It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories.

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.

What happens next is both stupid and logical, much like most of life, really.

“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.”

“I knew him since we were little, I’ve… always known him,” he replies, because with the sort of friendship they had, there was never a “before.”

Joar smiled dreamily and said: “I’m going to have a normal life. I’ll work in the harbor. Get up every morning and feel like shit, be angry all the fucking time. But every so often, on a fucking Sunday, I’ll go to some museum somewhere. And deep inside, there’ll be a painting by a world-famous artist, and it’ll be so beautiful that I can cope with being alive for one more week.”

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Then he read Bodil Malmsten again: “That is what death is, that you are never answering again.”

“If you wait until you’re old enough to smoke, you die even if you don’t smoke,” she replies, which is irritatingly hard to argue with.

The brain is so peculiar, the things that get stuck in it.

“The geniuses. I only fall in love with the geniuses.”

Joar closed his eyes as if he was really trying to memorize it. He wasn’t scared of death, because he had never expected to live a long life. He knew that happiness existed, but not for him. He believed in Heaven, that good people lived forever, just not that he was one of them. All he wanted was for his mom to be safe and for the artist to have a big life.

“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.”

Love is chaos.

“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,” Ted says.

“I could never have lived there without him. I would just have lain awake all night waiting for him to come home. I would have had to throw away all the eggs, because he was the only one who ate them, but I would have forgotten not to buy them. I would have forgotten that he didn’t exist, all the time. I would have gotten angry because the light in the bathroom was turned off, because I used to get so annoyed with him for always leaving it on. I would have saved all his shoes, all his shirts, and I would have been angry with the spring and hated flowers when they appeared because they drowned out the last smells of him. I would have always laid the table for two on the balcony. I would have had to eat all the popcorn myself. I would never have been able to pick a film.”

“If you feel strange, like you don’t belong anywhere, that’s because you still have your wings. They’re rubbing beneath your skin,” the janitor smiled.

Then he quoted his mom’s favorite poem, by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“You can’t trust men, Louisa, they’re far too easy to love.”

Sometimes he imagines that mankind invented God just to have someone to be angry with, because you can’t be angry with a dad who’s dead, not even a little bit.

“Everyone say: Don’t go to bed angry! But you know, if you hold hand, very hard to be angry for long, you know? So you hold hand, when you go for walk, when you watch TV. You hold hand, so you know: You and me. Always.”

What to do without hope?

That was how you knew that Joar and Ali had boundless imaginations, because otherwise two people who loved each other so much could never have found so much to fight about.

It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.

And Ted thought about how life is so fragile, coincidence decides so much, it takes so little to change everything.

“Polar bears only live at the North Pole. Penguins only live at the South Pole.”

“But you never found anyone?” “I never looked.” “Was Ali your first love?” “My last.”

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.