Blush

by Jamie Brenner

if you were the smartest person in the room, you were in the wrong room.

That was the oddest thing about middle age: the past could sometimes feel more potent, more relevant, than the present. Life was like tossing a ball into the ocean. She thought the past was the past, but then it came riding back on a wave and lying at her feet.

“Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished what it has to say.’”

Losing your innocence has very little to do with virginity, you know. Loss of innocence comes when you have to deal with the real world by yourself, when you learn that the first rule of life is kill or be killed.

But when someone comes into your life and changes your understanding of yourself, that person becomes a part of you.

But unlike in the books she’d been reading, in real life, women let themselves be pushed aside. They acted like good girls. They didn’t make waves. That was why she loved those old novels so much: the heroines had balls. They didn’t ask permission, and they didn’t beg forgiveness. They were bosses. Fine, it was fiction. But why couldn’t it also be a playbook?