My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.