The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.

Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,

The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air.

It was always that way with women I found threatening, that there was some unfulfilled longing to be friends. I didn’t know quite why she threatened me. She was full of life and verve and a refreshing bluntness, and yet I wanted her contained instead of celebrated for these qualities I secretly admired.

ages 16-21 really relates to this.