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.

a man who works with his mind does not usually consider a life working with his hands a better one.

He was attuned to the dangers of the world but not to its delights and joys; even love, to him, was not a state of elation but a source of anxiety and fear:

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.”

“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 like that, sometimes, you know; you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.

I want to be the one to discover it, I want to be the one to solve it, I want to be the one who looks up from his desk and sees the sky outside a dense black and realizes that he doesn’t know how long he’s been at the lab, that he’s been so involved, so immersed, that the fact of a day has ceased to hold any significance.

I have always wondered how people knew it was time to leave a place, whether that place was Phnom Penh or Saigon or Vienna. What had to happen for you to abandon everything, for you to lose hope that things would ever improve, for you to run toward a life you couldn’t begin to imagine? I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were. And then, suddenly, it’s too late.

Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable.

That pretty fiction we told ourselves when we were younger, that our friends were our family, as good as our spouses and children, was revealed in that first pandemic to be a lie: The people you loved the most were in fact the people you had chosen to live with—friends were an indulgence, a luxury, and if discarding them meant you might better protect your family, then you discarded them quickly.