En gang hadde jeg sju pappaer på sju år. Dette er fortellingen om de årene.

Så møtte vi Arvid som var hundre prosent sjuk i hodet og skulle ta alt til neste nivå, han hadde planer, han hadde bål i magen, men han hadde ikke kontroll og kom ikke lenger enn å knerte en kjerring, for han hadde ingenting å tape.

Man venner seg til det meste, selv ting man ikke burde venne seg til, som at sommeren slutter og aldri kommer tilbake, eller at vennene dine går inn i en verden som er mørk mørk og snart ser du de ikke mer.

For nå var drugsa der for real, og ikke bare sånn litt ned i lungene, jeg snakker opp i nesa og inn i åra, folk stakk høl på seg sjøl og ble kledd i trefrakk, God bless 'em.

De fleste kids har en normal barndom, hvert fall når de går igjennom den, det er ikke før seinere de skjønner at noe kanskje ikke var helt som det skulle.

Ingen eksempler å følge, det var bare sånn det var, vi vokste uten noen å strekke oss etter, og da er det fort gjort å gro litt skjevt.

Kanskje begynner alle katastrofer med fødsel.

That's the past, isn't it. You think it's behind you, then one day you walk into a room and it's there waiting for you.

I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.

You couldn't protect the people you loved - that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

The past hung in the present like smoke in the air, like vapour trails, fading out slowly.

There is no past or future: when we think of the past, our memories occur in the present; when we imagine the future, we only do so from the standpoint of the present.

We are younger and thinner than I remember ever feeling. We look so clean. As if we mean no harm. As if we are not harm itself.

The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction

The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.

I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life, A cruel kind of joke, you'll agree. Anyway, you're young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge. Thanks.

Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if I ever lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my lfe.

The image of that life: how beautiful, how painful, to belive it could after all be possible. For so long it has hurt to much even to think. And now everything hurts so much all the time that to think makes no difference, to think even lends a kind of sweetness to the terrible pain. The life they could have had together.

Attachment, the cause of all suffering, so the Buddhist say. To cling to what you have, what you have had, the life you have known, the handful of people and places you have ever really loved, to cling and not let go. Never relenting, never accepting, becoming all the time more enmeshed, holding harder, loving and hating more.

The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.