And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

by Fredrik Backman

“Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss,”

He suddenly sounds so afraid. His body is heavy, his voice is weak, and his skin is a sail about to be abandoned by the wind.

He holds the girl’s hand tighter and tighter and tighter, until she tenderly loosens one finger after another and kisses him on the neck. “You’re squeezing me like I was a rope.” “I don’t want to lose you again. I couldn’t go on.”

“My memories are running away from me, my love, like when you try to separate oil and water. I’m constantly reading a book with a missing page, and it’s always the most important one.”

For more than half a century they belonged to one another. She detested the same characteristics in him that last day as she had the first time she saw him under that tree, and still adored all the others. “When you looked straight at me when I was seventy I fell just as hard as I did when I was sixteen.” She smiles.

“You never became ordinary to me, my love. You were electric shocks and fire.”

Their very first fight had been about the universe; he explained how it had been created and she refused to accept it. He raised his voice, she got angry, he couldn’t understand why, and she shouted, “I’m angry because you think everything happened by chance but there are billions of people on this planet and I found you so if you’re saying I could just as well have found someone else then I can’t bear your bloody mathematics!”

he spent an entire working life calculating probabilities and she was the most improbable person he ever met. She turned him upside-down.

That’s one good thing about forgetting things. You forget the things that hurt too.”

“What does it feel like?” “Like constantly searching for something in your pockets. First you lose the small things, then it’s the big ones. It starts with keys and ends with people.”

“When you’ve forgotten a person, do you forget you’ve forgotten?” “No, sometimes I remember that I’ve forgotten. That’s the worst kind of forgetting. Like being locked out in a storm.

The teacher wanted us to write what we thought the meaning of life was once.” “What did you write?” “Company.” Grandpa closes his eyes. “That’s the best answer I’ve heard.”

He remembers each of the very first times he saw her, he hides those pictures as far from the rain as he can. They were sixteen and even the snow was happy that morning, falling soap-bubble light and landing on cold cheeks as though the flakes were gently trying to wake someone they loved. She stood in front of him with January in her hair and he was lost. She was the first person in his life that he couldn’t work out, though he spent every minute of it after that day trying.

“Death isn’t fair.” “No, death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”

Old eyes, new sunlight, and he still remembers how it felt to fall in love.

“How did you fall in love with her?” the boy asks. Grandpa’s hands land with one palm on his own knee and one on the boy’s. “She got lost in my heart, I think. Couldn’t find her way out. Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.” And then comes his laughter, crackling and popping like it’s smoke from dry wood in his stomach. He puts an arm around the boy. “Never in my life have I asked myself how I fell in love with her, Noahnoah. Only the other way around.”

“Noahnoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back. Live your life. It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”

we’re not going into space because we’re afraid of aliens. We’re going because we’re scared we’re alone. It’s an awfully big universe to be alone in.’ ”