My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

To anyone who is young and wants to create something. Do it.

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.

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.

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.

It’s like he must have felt every single feeling inside himself all at the same time, and it must have been almost unbearable, because otherwise no one would be able to paint like that. You know?”

Louisa can’t help thinking that’s a kind thing to do, taking the risk of getting lung cancer out of sheer politeness.

Whenever Joar got teased at school for being short, the artist always thought that if only they all knew just how put down he had been by that evil man, they would have thought it was a miracle that Joar had grown at all.

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.

our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety.

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.” Because what he really wants to know is: “How the hell do all the rest of you cope?”

Sometimes he wants to yell that everything he paints is about one of his humans dying, can’t everyone see that? His best human died, and he can’t stop feeling sad, he’s sad all the time, sad everywhere.

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. Because all he dreamed about was not being recognized in the street, and not being adult, and about lying on a pier with his best friends and drinking sun-warmed sodas and reading superhero comics. About being no one at all alongside his very best no ones.

“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.”

Louisa thinks it looks like he doesn’t know how to cry, like he has only read about tears in a manual and misunderstood the point.

“What?” the artist wondered disconsolately, always heartbroken at not being able to be all the things everyone wanted.

“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.”

Because August meant his old man was on vacation from work, and that was the worst. The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time, because that meant darker jealousy and deeper paranoia and more empty bottles.

The teachers said that Joar didn’t listen, but what they really meant was that he didn’t obey.

once Joar’s brain got stuck on a thought, all his brain cells flocked around it like ants around a sugar sandwich, but unfortunately it wasn’t always the smartest brain cells that got there first. So he got terribly angry at strange things.

So the artist lived in constant fear that one day Joar would love someone so much that he would end up in prison.

After that day the artist always hid his sketch pad extra carefully from the sixth graders. Not to protect himself, and certainly not to protect them, but to protect Joar. Because Joar was dangerous, but the world was always more dangerous. The world is undefeated.

He knew that his future was nothing, as empty as the clouds.

“Don’t worry about me! You’re going to be world-famous and happy, like the celebrities on TV.

Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.

Then they watched TV, and the happy celebrities, and Joar did his job: he made her think he had forgotten, he was so good at that.

It was the first time Ted had lost someone he loved, when you grow up you realize that fourteen is actually quite late, that not losing anyone in all the years before then was really just luck.

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

I can’t even look after shoes, and you’ve left me with a person, he thinks angrily.

“I can’t take responsibility for that much money,” Ted had whispered.

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

People always said he was extraordinary, but he was just like everyone else, at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.

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

Everything Joar had dreamed of for the artist really did happen: he was discovered by influential people, got into a prestigious art school, and moved to a big city far away. There he would lie on the floor of a small room, terrified, crying with Ted on the phone all night. No one else understood their grief. The world was so overwhelming, harsh and violent, the boys were too sensitive to have hearts.

But really it was the artist who needed a home, and home was Ted’s snoring in the darkness, like when they were kids, back in the basement.

It really is a remarkably bad idea, all this. Worse than socks in the toaster.

Once she’s gone, Ted sits alone and marvels at how silently an eighteen-year-old can get to her feet, without so much as a single groan or creak of the spine.

When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.

“Even shorter than you? Seriously? What are you, hobbits?”

Because when Ted had first gotten to know Joar and the artist when they were twelve years old, he had hardly dared speak at all, always so frightened of pronouncing words wrong. He was an immigrant kid who could barely remember the country he was from, just young enough when he left to not speak his old language fluently, but just old enough for his accent to always be noticeable in his new one. He had gotten used to the fact that whenever he heard the mocking laughter of other children, it was usually directed at him. But Joar and the artist had laughed in a different way, without any of the malice, so with them was the first time Ted ever dared to babble. There was no greater security for a child.

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

He feels a sudden urge to pee far more often now than he was prepared for, his body has started to wake him at night, he presumes it’s getting its revenge because it’s annoyed he’s keeping it alive.

“So you never went back home?” Louisa says. “He was my home,” Ted whispers.

He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

That was why she got on so well with Joar, because he was an idiotic genius.

she was counting the hours between the time the people in her home were getting drunk and the time they’d have fallen asleep. The children of addicts always know what the time is.

It suddenly occurs to Ted that she must have been quiet for a long time for him to fall asleep, which is a pretty big compliment to him, because she babbles when she’s nervous. He no longer makes her nervous.