Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

If we can just rise to the challenge of communication—here in the parlor of your mind—we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.

But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.

The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

At church potlucks they play a secret game of dumping random cans of food in casserole dishes and pretending their grandmothers gave them the recipe. Jell-O is their favorite. Campbell’s mushroom Jell-O goes on everything. So does Velveeta, which is a cheese Jell-O that only sort of hardens. My

I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.

It’s the most important thing about you, whose you are. It’s more important than your race or religion. It’s more important than what shows you like. It’s the part of you that talks to itself so late at night that you’re not even sure you’re awake.

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.

A 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.

Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love.

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.

for some reason they won’t believe miracles when they happen in offices and airports.

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.

Anybody who has watched a ball fall from the sky and burst into a cloud of acid that washed over him and everyone he ever loved is not somebody who tells the story to entertain people.

And whenever you look back and realize something was the last of something—like the last moment you ever saw your grandfather’s house or the smell of the street you lived on or Orich bars or whatever—it can be an ordinary thing, but it also becomes the only thing you have, the clearest memory, and it gains all this extra meaning.

Like most kings, he was a god who only ever devoured.

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.

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.