My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Panic spreads through the group like pee in a tent.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away.

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

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

Everyone should be allowed to be fourteen for far longer than a year.

He would never have let anyone say they were bad parents, he understood that it was practically impossible to be a good one, children are so fragile that if you’re the least bit fragile yourself, it’s hopeless right from the start.

He’s thought so many times as an adult that it’s a lie that people are scared of being alone, because what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.

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

There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away.

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.

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?

“It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”