Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.

Men who make Committees and go around stealing mothers and hurting them, they’re just red ants killing black ants in a giant universe that has tornadoes bigger than the biggest thing we have ever built. And that’s a nice thought. It’s nice to be unimportant.

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?

There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good.

god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love. And sometimes, like Sima, you get neither.

OH, AND IN CASE IT wasn’t obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.

We know this because Oklahoma has more tornadoes than anywhere on Earth. If you’re keeping up, that means they don’t just have a god who listens or a god who speaks, but a god who puts his finger in the dirt and swirls it.

Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Scheherazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories. And what about you? You might feel what I felt on the roof that night. I was ashamed of being so weak, angry at Ray for everything he’d done, tired of being poor, and afraid of the thunder and lightning crashing all around me. I thought of my Baba Haji as I braced against the roof of the house. I prayed to God I would see him again. It won’t be in this life, so it has to be wherever God puts us. I prayed that even though I was Christian and he was whatever he was, I prayed that God would still let him hold me once we’re both dead. Reader, I think He heard me. I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so.

actually, I think the point is that above all other laws is the law of love. I forgot that one for a second.

“They spend extra money just to tell us we’re not welcome.”

“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

All the good stuff is in between and around the things that happen. It’s what you imagine I might be like when I’m not telling you a story, but we’re sitting together in silence.

And you’d be right, because being breakable has nothing to do with toughness. Everything breaks. Everything is whirling around in a big bunch of motion and energy crashing into each other at the size of atoms and icebergs, and will crumble eventually. But then you’d say, “So what makes you think your mom is so tough?” And I would say this part slowly, cause I’ve said it before. I’d probably even whisper, “Cause she’s unstoppable.” Every rock smashes into everything else and breaks. That doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the rock keeps going the same direction it was going when it smashed. Do you see what I mean? What keeps going? What do you know that keeps going? Never distracted? Never bored? Never deterred? Beat up and threatened, sure. Humiliated and ignored, often. But never never stopped. That’s right. You get it now. My mom.

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.