My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

It hits her so suddenly and so mercilessly that this is all she owns now, seventeen years on the planet and it fits inside one bag, that her skeleton just folds.

Louisa curses and curses and curses, then suddenly she starts crying so violently that her whole body shakes, because she had a completely perfect plan this morning, and it definitely didn’t include her standing in an alley behind a church, crying so hard that a homeless cat gets snot on its fur.

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

Unlike the artist, Joar was good at fighting, that happens if you get beaten a lot,

The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.

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.

Not to be mean, but healthy people aren’t quite right in the head, the artist thinks.

The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning?

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...

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.

He’s almost forty years old and he’s lived a long life, remarkably long, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. He

“Don’t hurt yourself!” he makes her promise, and that’s the most loving thing any adult has ever said to her.

Life? It’s long.

He feels like telling the old men and women who spend fortunes on his paintings that he saw so much violence when he was young that he still feels it on his skin, as if he might get bruised just from existing.

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young, art that is a joy so overwhelming that you almost can’t bear it.

you have loved anyone as much as Ted loves the artist, so much that you’re prepared to be mistaken for someone else just to see your friend’s face light up for a couple of seconds, then you know what he feels. Otherwise there’s probably no way to explain.

the artist has been dying for a long time, just very slowly.

“On my gravestone I want you to put: ‘Enter from other side,’ ” the artist whispers, because he knows jokes like that drive Ted mad. “Be quiet,” Ted mumbles. “Or ‘Here lies a man who ate his vegetables but died anyway,’ ” the artist suggests.

“I’m sorry my death is so unexciting. If I could have made it a bit more spectacular, the price of my paintings would have gone up. Was a heroin overdose really too much to ask? Or getting murdered?”

Ted’s ears are ringing as he lays his forehead against the edge of the artist’s bed. Afterward it will feel as if this went on for several days, because that’s how death sounds.

Once upon a time, church bells used to ring for the dead, now it’s telephones, and the more they ring, the more important the person was. 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.

It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

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.

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

“I do,” she insists. “If you were his friend, I’m sorry. Because the whole world lost an artist, but you lost your human. And I’m sorry you had to share that with the rest of us. You should be allowed to have your grief in peace.”

Grief is a selfish bacteria, it demands all our attention.

“I knew him since we were little, I’ve… always known him,” he replies, because with the sort of friendship they had, there was never a “before.”

“But WHY?” she yells, which makes Ted lose control and yell back: “BECAUSE I CAN’T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOU AS WELL!” And that’s the first time she sees him cry.

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.

At night the teenagers lived in different realities, but at daybreak they belonged to each other again, at the crossroads between the houses.

The world is extremely inventive, it has plenty of ways of breaking children.

A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

but the ultimate expression of love is nagging, we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that, and so do all best friends.

His old man hit them as if they weren’t people. Sometimes

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.

the world has spent thousands of years practicing how to puncture the lungs of children who are different.

It’s hard to say “I love you” when you’re fourteen years old. And completely impossible to dare to whisper: “Don’t hurt yourself, because you’d be hurting me too.”

When you’re fourteen years old, friendship and infatuation are the same feeling, light from the same star, so perhaps there ought to be a better word for it. But how do I explain that I’m freezing to death if I’m not seen by you?

Louisa would never draw people, just animals, and most often giraffes, because their bodies looked the way Louisa felt: really tall and really wide, but in all the wrong places.

It’s the job of fourteen-year-olds not to be great at things, the only expectation they have to live up to is to be morons, they’re put on this earth so their moms and dads will support the headache-pill industry.

Children have two worlds, the one they have been given and the one they can dream about,

It would take a really, really big idiot to dream anything as grand as that. Thank goodness he had one of those.

When sufficiently wealthy people want something bad enough, it becomes invaluable, because then art isn’t experienced through the eyes, but by the ears, they’re not paying for a picture but for its name and history.

That’s why the children on the painting are so important that they’re protected by guards, but the children on the pier in real life could die without anyone even caring.

Joar hardly ever spoke about his own future. Joar was always in a hurry for the present.

The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time, because that meant darker jealousy and deeper paranoia and more empty bottles.

His mother wouldn’t survive another August, Joar was certain of that, and he knew that his own body wasn’t yet strong enough to protect her. He was always the shortest of them, but his friends would always remember him as the biggest and bravest. His old man was the opposite, he weighed two hundred pounds but was a tiny, tiny man.

The teachers said that Joar didn’t listen, but what they really meant was that he didn’t obey.