To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.

He had a theatrical, deliberately old-fashioned, deeply affected manner of speech—all Oh!s and Ah!s—but it irritated less than it ought: It was both unnatural and genuine, and felt less a pretension than a reflection of an artistic sensibility, a suggestion of liveliness and good humor, as if Edward Bishop were determined to not be too serious, as if seriousness, the kind with which most people greeted the world, was the affectation, and not enthusiasm.

Yet to be so known was to trade adventure for certainty, and therefore to be exiled to an unsurprising life. Even in Europe, he had been passed from acquaintance to acquaintance of his grandfather’s: His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not.

It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being.

“Have you a girl at home for you?” Morgan asked him as they walked through the Piazza Santa Croce, and David, smiling, said he hadn’t. “Just a moment,” said Morgan, peering at him. “Where in America did you say you were from, exactly?” “I didn’t,” he said, smiling again, knowing what would follow. “And I’m not. I’m from New York.”

You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness.

“I’m not scared because I’m worried it’s going to hurt,” he said, slowly, and when he looked up, his large, light eyes looked even larger and lighter than usual. “I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

but he had, even then, a kind of inwardness; he was somehow able to suggest, without ever saying it, that he needed no one else, that he knew something that none of the rest of us did, and until we did, it wasn’t worth his trying to have a conversation with us.

My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,”

And here I must restate that I never blamed you for leaving me. I was not your responsibility; you were mine. You had to find your way out of a situation you should never have been in at all.

You couldn’t force a name back into existence. A name was not a plant or an animal—it flourished from desire, not need, and therefore was subject to all the fickle attentions of humans.

There wasn’t anything I could say to this without sounding callous, so I just drank my wine and said nothing.

We walked back across the street—the heat so thick and stunning it felt as if the air had been knitted from wool—and up to our apartment in silence, and once we were inside, Nathaniel turned to me and we put our arms around each other. It had been a long, long time since we’d held each other like that, and even though I knew he was clinging to me out of sorrow and fear more than affection, I was glad for it.

Somehow, Nathaniel and I have settled into a relationship that’s more married than when we were actually married. Much of this is because of the baby—it feels like we’re reliving our early lives together, except now both of us know exactly how disappointed we are in the other and aren’t waiting to find out.

The world we live in now is about survival, and survival is always present tense. The past is no longer relevant; the future has failed to materialize. Survival allows for hope—it is, indeed, predicated on hope—but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.

More and more frequently these days, I think about how, of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured.

I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer.