Фредерик Бакман (Fredrik Backman)A FEW WORDS BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORDS
This is a short story about what you would be prepared to sacrifice in order to save a life. If it was not only your future on the line, but also your past. Not only the places you are going, but the footprints you have left behind. If it was all of it, all of you, who would you give yourself up for?
I wrote this story late one night shortly before Christmas in 2016. My wife and children were sleeping a few arm lengths away. I was very tired; it had been a long and strange year, and I had been thinking a lot about the choices families make. Everyday, everywhere, we go down one road or another. We play around; we stay at home; we fall in love and fall asleep right next to each other. We discover we need someone to sweep us off our feet to realize what time really is.
So I tried to tell a story about that.
It was published in the local newspaper of my hometown, Helsingborg, in the southernmost part of Sweden. All the locations in the story are real—I went to school around the corner from the hospital, and the bar where the characters drink is owned and run by childhood friends of mine. I’ve gotten very drunk there on several occasions. If you’re ever around Helsingborg, I highly recommend it.
I live six hundred kilometers further north now, in Stockholm, with my family. So, in retrospect, I think this story was not just about how I felt about love and death that night I was sitting on the floor next to the bed my wife and our kids were sleeping in, but also about my feelings for the place where I grew up. Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.
Maybe you will find this to be a strange story, I don’t know. It’s not very long, so at least it will be over quickly in that case. But I hope my younger self would have read it and found it to be . . . well . . . not horrible. I think he and I could have gone for a beer. Talked about choices. I would have shown him pictures of my family and he would have said, “Alright. You did alright.”