My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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. When you’re fourteen you know every corner of each other, all the weakest and most fragile places, and of course you can’t be allowed to become an adult with all that knowledge, because an adult would never be able to keep secrets like that.

Twenty-five years ago Ted and his friends lived outside every day, all through summer vacation, inseparable until the sun went down. There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away.

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

But how do I explain that I’m freezing to death if I’m not seen by you?

You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.

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

“People worshipped his art. He was loved by millions of people. But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

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. But he doesn’t quite know how to say that.

Ali really was Joar’s second life. They only had each other for a little more than a year. Who has time to get to know someone, really know them, in that time? If you so much as ask the question, you weren’t there, you’ve never fallen that madly in love, never been addicted to another person’s breath. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start, bright light and loud bangs and heart attacks.

Only then did Ali look out at the first row of the audience. There sat her friends. Joar, Ted, and the artist. Wearing dresses. They had run home and borrowed them from Joar’s mom’s wardrobe. Obviously all the dresses were too big, because all the boys were too small, and they would be teased about it every day for the rest of their time at school. Joar would get into so many dress-related fights when spring came that the principal might as well have moved Joar’s desk into his office. Joar didn’t care. It was worth every blow if Ali realized she wasn’t so damn alone, at least not all the damn time. Who gets a friend like that? Hardly anyone.

“Were you a… couple?” she asks tentatively. “No.” “Because he was in love with someone else?” Ted nods softly, his chin heavy with loss, but not bitterness. “We were as close to a couple as you can get, maybe. It’s probably hard to understand.” Louisa shakes her head slowly. “No. It isn’t hard at all. You loved each other so much that you were scared of accidentally breaking each other.”

“You can’t trust them, have you ever seen the floor of a men’s bathroom? And those creatures are actually allowed to make political decisions? And drive cars? Do we really want to put people who can’t even piss straight in charge of all the horsepower in the world? We shouldn’t even put them in charge of one horse!”

“You mustn’t be frightened of death, Giant!” Fish had said when they had almost reached the foster home, and then she had pointed at the sky: “Look at the sun, do you get how crazy it is that it rises every morning? Do you get that, Giant? How crazy it is that we are here?” Then Fish had growled and howled and made faces at Louisa to show how insane it was that a human being could do all that, how impossible a body is. “Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”

He’s thought so many times as an adult that it’s a lie that people are scared of being alone, because what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Lucky children often ask what the most dangerous animal in the world is, but all other children already know. It isn’t the lion or the hippopotamus or the snake or the spider or the shark. The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man. And the worst thing about a young man? That until very recently he was just a boy. No one gets any warning when he stops being one.

Because she has never abandoned anyone, so she doesn’t know if she can. But being abandoned? She’s world-class at that.

Ted watches them go and thinks exhaustedly that it doesn’t matter if life is long or short, it isn’t time that’s the problem, it’s the speed. Far too much happens when you’re alive, everything goes so damn fast, how are you supposed to have time to be a human being?

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.

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 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.”

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.

It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?” “Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

“Would you be married to someone ordinary? Like Ali would have been?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because that was… her thing. She said people like her and me couldn’t be with each other, because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.” “But you never found anyone?” “I never looked.” “Was Ali your first love?” “My last.”

“Can I ask something?” Louisa asks, then asks immediately: “How do you cope with death?” It’s Christian’s mother who answers: “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.’ ” “It’s cool that we happened at all,” Louisa whispers. “Something like that,” the mother smiles.

“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.” Louisa hugs herself then. Ted carefully cleans his glasses and says: “Kimkim used to sit in a window looking down at the street and ask how everyone else could bear to be human.” “What did you tell him?” Louisa asks. “I said that maybe we could learn how.” “Have you figured it out yet?” “Maybe I’m on my way. That’s all anyone can be.”