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.

“It will soon be a new year,” his grandfather said into this silence, “and new years are always more revealing than old ones. You will make your decision, and it will be yes or no, and the years will keep ending and beginning and ending and beginning, whatever you choose.”

He had always been wary of children, their unflinching, unbroken gazes that suggested they could see him in a way that adults no longer bothered to or could,

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.

he was, for perhaps the first time in his life, doing something he wanted, something that frightened him, but something that was his own. He was choosing foolishly, perhaps, but he was choosing.

And so what if this was Heaven? Would he know it if it were? Perhaps not. But he knew it was not whence he had come: That was someone else’s Heaven, but it was not his. His was somewhere else, but it would not appear in front of him; rather, it would be his to find. Indeed, was that not what he had been taught, been made to hope for, his entire life? Now it was time to seek.

Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone. So he would stand here for another moment, the bag leaden in his hand, and then he would take a breath, and then he would make his first step: his first step to a new life; his first step—to paradise.

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.”

“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

he knew the fear of feeling inadequate, the burden of disappointing. He would never do it again; he would be free. What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

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. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say.

“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.”

It’s funny—of all the things I was scared of, I was never scared of the dark. In the dark, everyone was helpless, and, knowing that, that I was just like everyone else, no less, made me feel braver.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

It’s not too late, it’s not too late, it’s not too late after all. And then I’ll start walking—not to my mother’s house, not to Lipo-wao-nahele, but to somewhere else, the same place I hope you’ve gone, and I won’t stop, I won’t need to rest, not until I make it there, all the way to you, all the way to paradise.

everything was good, or good enough, and yet I had the sensation at that moment that I was atop a large piece of white plastic tubing, and the tube was rolling down a dirt path, and I was surfing it, almost, my feet constantly moving, trying to stay upright.

I would be once again who I was, a married woman, a lab tech, a person who accepted the way the world was, who understood that to wish for anything else was useless, because there was nothing I could do, and so it was best not even to try.

It was easy to believe nothing was happening if you tried.

a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else. And yet it also does look like something. The things I have described are elements of the sanctioned life, the life that can be lived aboveground. But out of the corner of our eyes, there is another life, one we see in glimpses, in movements.

But behind all these concerns and minor anxieties is something deeper: the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away.

We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we’re successful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive.

For a long time, I assumed that it would be a virus that would destroy us all in the end, that humans would be felled by something both greater and much smaller than ourselves. Now I realize that that is not the case. We are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.

In later years, I would think: If only we had had a few more weeks with him close to our side, away from the world; if only we could have convinced him that safety was valuable, and that we could be the ones to provide it to him. But we hadn’t had a few more weeks, and we hadn’t been able to convince him.

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.

I’ll turn east and begin my long flight across the sea, flapping my way toward you, and her, and maybe even her husband, all the way to London, to my loves, to freedom, to safety, to dignity—to paradise.