My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to “make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

They were halfway through July at the time, those hours every year when you suddenly wonder where all the others have gone, like you’ve been mugged. The middle of summer vacation is a quite specific sort of sadness.

“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.”

Heaven is a summer.

Some people have those sorts of hands, as if all living things instinctively know when they are being touched by someone who would never do them harm. He gently held it up toward the sky, but the bird didn’t fly off, as if it didn’t realize it was free.

“In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past. 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.”

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?