Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

They’ll think I want their pity. In America they distrust unhappy people.

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.

IMAGINE YOU’RE EVIL. Not misunderstood. Not sad. But evil. Imagine you’ve got a heart that spends all day wanting more. Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity. Imagine you’re like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers. Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.

Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey. Imagine you’re evil and you don’t do any of those things, but you’re like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what’s going on and you say nothing’s going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English. Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone. Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it. Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

And sometimes you fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain. It’s not a happy love. It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time you aren’t in pain can seem like happiness.

Walking through the woods is more dangerous because there are no adults in the woods, just other kids. And kids are dangerous.

“That is disgusting.” Everybody agreed. “It’s like a bidet,” said Mrs. Miller. “It’s just a nozzle that sprays water. It’s very hygienic.” I said, “They do it in France.” People like France, so that ended the conversation, even though the French kings pooped right in the hallways of their castles.

I was just counting the memories. Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.”

If you’re a kid reading this, there isn’t anything you can do about it, but grownies can at least remember—when you fight in front of kids, what you’re really doing. To us, parents are like blankets. Or parachutes, in a world that is otherwise full of snakes, and leopards, and Committee men, tornadoes, bullies, and death. And as a kid, you’re looking out and seeing all this with a near constant spike of adrenaline—always a second from panic—because you understand you can’t do much. You’re a little ball of soft meat with no shell or escape skills or battle strategies. You’re a milk drinker with milk teeth that fall out and you bleed.

When you’re speaking a language you don’t know, you forget how loud to make the words.