My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Ted drank his beer and replied: “You’re enough to look up to.” That was the first time his big brother had ever been told that. That he was enough.

Not long after that, Ted’s big brother would meet a girl and fall in love. It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.

It would be many years before Ted realized this wasn’t because she was scared for her own sake, or for Joar’s, she wasn’t worried about their future because she always thought what Joar did: that they didn’t have one. She was just worried because he was taking the artist and Ted with them.

gawps.

Ted really is a good friend to him for not pointing out that it should be “Michelin.”

Down in the harbor, when the heavy construction crane turned just a fraction of a second too quickly in the wind, it probably wouldn’t have taken more than a few extra grams to change the weight distribution so that the steel beam started to sway. It would probably have been enough for a small bird to land and take off again.

She smiled and people saw superficiality, she was kind and people saw weakness, no matter what she did they would always talk crap about her in the supermarket. Women like her can never do the right thing, their men’s guilt is always theirs.

“Damned if I know… I don’t even think all the people who go to church every Sunday believe in God. I think they just need company. To feel that they belong to a group.”

“I think it’s because it’s hard to draw movement. So when the people who made him up had to draw that in the comic, they needed the cape to show that he was… moving.”

“Fish read in a book that in Heaven, you get to choose one moment from your life. Your best moment. And then you get to feel like that forever. She said it doesn’t matter if we live till we’re eighty then, because that’s just lots and lots and lots of nows. And one single really good now is enough.”

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.

She’s short and stern-looking, she looks a lot like the sort of woman who might well end up in prison if a young person asked if she needed help crossing the street.

“Is it horrible being an adult?” the girl asked. “Unbearable,” the mother replied. “You fail with almost everything, all the time.”

“Ted gives everyone more love. But I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.”

Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try.

It wasn’t until much later that Kimkim found out that his mom and dad had sold just about everything they owned, including his dad’s car, to be able to buy everything he needed for art school. Christian’s mother helped a lot too. When the men in the harbor found out, they organized a collection of their own, his dad would never brag about his son, but all his workmates down there would do it for him. One single good deed can’t outweigh a lifetime of bad ones, but those men were prepared to give it a try. They were hard people who had lived hard lives, but one damn Saturday they would go to a damn museum and see a damn painting, and that feeling would be like a damn sunrise in their chests: that they had been part of something beautiful.

Then she felt like she knew what she was doing on Earth, she wrote. How many people find something that makes them feel like that? How lucky was she? Early one morning, not long after her eighteenth birthday, she went out into the water and never came back.

“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.’ ”

“If I’d asked him to stay, he would have stayed forever. Hell, I wanted him to stay. That’s why I had to… yell terrible things at him. I shouted that I’d had to fucking look after him since preschool, but that I couldn’t do it anymore, because I can’t look after an infinite damn number of people! Now he had to damn well look after himself! I was as cruel as I could possibly be…”

“Don’t be ashamed to be a human being—be proud! Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly. You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”

Ted points at other houses and tells stories and fantasies. Their humans are playing hide-and-seek.

Ted and Joar empty their bank accounts to make sure Louisa has everything she needs when she goes. Well, it’s mostly Ted who funds it. But Joar makes coffee while Ted goes to the bank, and that counts too, if you were to ask Joar.

She grows up, she paints every day, she tries to learn to be a human being.