The Winners (Beartown, #3)

by Fredrik Backman

It isn’t you who’ve grown, it’s just that the rest of my world has shrunk around you, she thinks, hugging her boys.

Now they do everything themselves just like she always wanted when they were little and annoying, and now she wants to have it all back again because now they’re big and independent.

There are small groups of men in black jackets standing here and there, naturally they don’t usually go to the thirteen-year-olds’ games but things are different today. The violence that is coming becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Soon it will be over. Soon they’ll be grown-up. Mothers have no armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn’t even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now.

Like all parents, he just dreams of his children having things a bit better than him, a bit easier, but there’s no way to protect them against the world. We can’t even protect them from themselves.

You never get the same kind of friends again like you have when you’re a teenager. Not even if you keep them your whole life. It will never be the same as it was then.

For two and half years she actually laughed an awful lot, replacing every rotten little piece of herself like some mythical ship until she had become a new person. Her universe became so large that her childhood started to feel invented. She thought about writing to her little brother a million times but never did. She went to parties and danced, and one night the drugs took her. It happened so fast, in the middle of everything, her heart just stopped beneath the lights on the dance floor.

But most people want the same as him: to live in peace, to let your heart beat a little more slowly when night comes, to earn a bit of money to support the ones you love.

We hoped, oh, how we hoped, but deep down we probably knew that he wasn’t the sort who would get that. Because he was always the sort of person who stood in the way, the sort who protected, the sort who ran. He always thought he was the bad guy in all stories, the real heroes always do, that’s why stories about boys like him never end with them growing old. Stories about boys like him only end with us no longer dreaming of time machines, because if one was ever invented in the distant future, it would already have been used to travel back here by someone who loved him.

We try to just live our lives, live with each other, live with ourselves. Accepting joy when we find it, bearing grief when it finds us, and being amazed at our children’s happiness without falling apart when we think that we can never really protect them.

But perhaps most of all because, just like everyone else in every other place: If we don’t have tomorrow, what’s the alternative?

Every morning they wake up and think they can hear their own children laughing. Just for a moment.

And eventually enough time has passed for it to hurt only almost all the time. She has endured. She can miss him without screaming every time. Hug without crying all the time. Laugh without always feeling guilty. Life goes on. It doesn’t give us any other choice.

One day she will make us feel like winners again. Because she’s the bear. The bear from Beartown.