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.

And she’s particularly angry about rich people buying art, 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.

Time is a strange concept once you’ve been abandoned. If you’re five years old when your parent leaves you, the leaving didn’t happen on one particular day, it happens every day. It never stops.

They had one summer on that pier twenty-five years ago which felt like it was going to last forever, because 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.

“Louisa. Nice name. Happy birthday.”

That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island.

Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. 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. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love.

When a world-famous artist dies, phones ring on every continent, people talk about him on the news, people who have never met him cry. Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

Children have two worlds, the one they have been given and the one they can dream about, but not even the artist had enough imagination to believe it was possible to paint his way out of there.

Joar wasn’t stupid, he just happened to be the sort of person who only thought about one thing at a time, which was why he was so good at fixing engines. The artist, on the other hand, thought about everything all at once, which was why he could draw, but he always did it in the wrong order. From the edges of the paper toward the middle instead of the other way round, sky first, people last. So the world-famous painting wasn’t even a painting when he started, it was a drawing, because he couldn’t afford paint. And it wasn’t even a drawing of the sea to start with, it was a drawing of clouds, because clouds are nothing and that was how he saw himself. Everything else? That was what Joar saw in him. As an adult, the artist would be told that great artistry is something that has to find its way out of a person, but for him it was something that needed to find its way in. Because for him, art was love. Grief. A story.

But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”

Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety.

One time I asked her why she was so obsessed with what I was thinking, and she got angry and yelled: ‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’ ”

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”