My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it.

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.

The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a desert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.

Joar didn’t know how to whisper, You can paint whatever the hell you like, as long as you paint, I’m just scared I’ll lose you if you don’t. The artist had no words either, because he didn’t know how to explain to Joar that his anxiety made him feel like he was drowning. That he was so scared that if he held on to his friends’ hands, he would drag them down into the darkness with him.

right in the head, the artist thinks. Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing?

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

“I’m angry because you’re not taking this seriously,” Ted snaps, far more angrily than he intends. “Oh, I’m taking it seriously, Ted. I’m just not afraid. It’s been a long life,” he replies, like he has so many times before. “No,” Ted whispers, moist-eyed. Because it’s been a painfully short life, the blink of an eye, a single summer’s day.

“Don’t cry for me, Ted. I got to experience everything. It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it I got to see something unbelievably beautiful.” Ted nods disconsolately. “That girl’s paintings?” “No. You. I got to see you.”

life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.

“He wanted you to have it because he… because he spent his whole life waiting to meet someone who saw a wall the same way he did.”

It’s all too heavy, far too heavy for some of us, but we carry on anyway.

When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.

The brain is so peculiar, the things that get stuck in it.

“If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”

can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.

The brain does a lot of stupid things when it’s stressed. It won’t cooperate at all. Suddenly it starts reminding Louisa of her trick in the library bathroom, snaking on the floor, through the gap beneath the side wall, into the next stall, and how disgusted Ted would have been if he’d found out about that. She has to put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud.

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.

Many years later Louisa will sit on a train and say that the best thing about babies is that they remind us that life goes on, but just then

“Secret? You know, everyone ask: What’s the secret? Do you know? Holding hand!” the taxi driver nods. “Holding hand?” Louisa repeats. “Everyone say: Don’t go to bed angry! But you know, if you hold hand, very hard to be angry for long, you know? So you hold hand, when you go for walk, when you watch TV. You hold hand, so you know: You and me. Always.”

“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.”

That’s an extra cruelty that cancer brings, Ted thought, when you’re waiting for everything to go back to normal again. Until one day you realize that the illness has become the new normal.

Life is long, but it moves at high speed, a single step here or there can be enough to ruin everything.

It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.”