My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

This was in the spring, but no one had told winter, so the temperature was still below freezing at night, and there was still ice on the roof.

He was still wearing his backpack, every time he moved, the pills he had stolen from Ted’s dad’s bathroom cabinet rattled, a sound like stones rolling down a cliff. Perhaps the janitor heard them, perhaps he just saw something in the boy’s eyes, or the red marks on his lower arms, because he suddenly whispered: “Don’t hurt yourself.”

No one can explain why some fourteen-year-olds want to die. Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety. Because how could you even begin to explain such a feeling to someone who has been happy and secure all their life?

the artist was like a paper boat heading for a waterfall. Sometimes

“He was an accident,” he went on. “She never wanted to be a mother.” That was the kindest thing the artist could remember his dad saying about him, because at least he never said that he didn’t want to be a dad.

He got called terrible things, because children’s brutality knows no limits in its inventiveness.

maybe God decided which people would die, but the demons in children’s heads decided which ones had the strength to live. So Ted prayed loudly into the darkness, for mercy, for the demons to let go of his friend.

A backpack full of pills and a head full of demons, hardly any child would survive that. The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

the way you do when someone has said the nicest thing one person can say to another: I trust you. I trust you so much that I trust you with the start of life.

“Because it sounds like a story that isn’t going to end happily for everyone. And it’s easier to cope with sad endings if you’re holding a baby,”

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

‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’ ”

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?”

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

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

She stopped trying after that, loneliness was better than disappointment.

Fish had drifted off peacefully in her sleep. Her body full of happiness on credit.

mean, it’s that he might be kind for real. She wishes he hadn’t said what he did about believing in her. That’s too much responsibility. All she can give him is disappointment.

It was a miracle that Ted didn’t hit his head on the top of the door, given how tall he walked after that.

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.

It was stupid, but being stupid is human, and today she was extra human. So she stopped to listen, because she needed to lose hope. She needed to hear the train leave the station so she knew it was too late to change her mind and run back. Because she has never abandoned anyone, so she doesn’t know if she can. But being abandoned? She’s world-class at that.

He was like a piece of lint on clothing, Joar used to joke, you could go a whole day and suddenly you would catch sight of him and think: Oh! How long has that been there?

Exactly when they came in or how long they had been there before he noticed them, he had no idea, but suddenly they were all around him: Joar, Ali, and the artist. Like lint on clothing. They had no words, so they let him cry, only not alone.

Her hands are shaking. She wishes she were as good at abandoning people as she is at being abandoned, but it feels too late now.

“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.”

You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”

“Petrichor. That’s what it’s called. The smell of rain. People usually say it’s the soil that smells, but it’s actually most evident near pavement and rocks.”

It is an act of violence when an adult yells at a child, all adults know that deep down, because all adults were once little. Yet we still do it. Time after time, we fail at being human beings.

it was actually pretty remarkable that such a small woman could have a back large enough for half the town to talk about her behind it.

Of course most children get tired of being best friends with their moms, so she did everything with Joar as if it were the last time. But it never was. How lucky was she?

They had driven around town in the darkness all that night, and if she had let him, Joar would have just carried on driving, as far away as possible. But she didn’t dare leave her husband, and Joar couldn’t leave her. Their prison was invisible.

There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what libraries feel like for me.”

“It’s incredibly difficult being a mom, Louisa. It’s difficult being a human being.

But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”

“I said you’re not a bad person. You just pick bad friends. You pick people who are worse than you, because you think that’s all you deserve. You ought to pick people who are better than you.”

“Every day, a small eternity. Had I known how much the world had to offer, I would have asked for less.”

“Dad told me. Before he got sick. He used to talk a lot. It’s a shame you don’t remember that. Actually, maybe that’s good. Hell, maybe I’m actually a bit envious of the fact that you… don’t remember.”

Trying to be a musician, following their passion, that sort of thing was for parents who only wanted to give themselves a better life.

“It isn’t like it is in movies, Ted. It’s different in real life. But Dad once told me, when he was really fucking drunk, that he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

when their mom walked into the house, she intentionally stepped on all the floorboards that she knew creaked, so they would know she was there. And when she went into the kitchen she saw the unwashed plate that Ted had left on the counter so that she would know he was full and that she was a good mother. So she washed it and felt like one, just for a moment.

When she lay in bed that night she heard a shuffling sound outside her bedroom door, then a small thud, it was the big brother, who had gone to sleep on the floor in front of the door to her room. So her nightmares couldn’t come in.

man, this made me cry....

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

Violence isn’t a genetic illness, violence is a contagion, it passes from skin to skin. The heart gets infected.

“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. “Because you never know how many punches you’re going to get,”

The good days were never good, they were a lie, they never lasted. There were just enough of them for his mom to believe that the bad ones were somehow her fault.

Even so, the good days were worst of all, because there were always just enough of them for you to forget they were merely a countdown.

Ali heard that, unfortunately, and then she felt obliged to run and hit Joar really hard on the arm so he would hit her back. So that everyone would think that the tears in her eyes were because of that.

“I think perhaps it flew back to its friends, darling. You would have done the same.”

Joar had sold many bicycles in his life, but that day was the first time he had sold his own. And that was the money they used to buy the canvas and paint that would change the world.

No one else would probably ever understand that this was the most loving and accepting thing his brother had ever said to Ted. That he didn’t just ask if Ted was going out with Ali, but if he was going out with any of them.