excerpt

Her body fights and extricates her mind from those bubbleheaded years. Memory is a living thing, she thinks. Where it is amputated, severed, it swiftly grows itself into a whole again. The completeness in her memory makes up for the void in her present. The laws of compensation. It is a game, she believes, where the conscious and subconscious are at play. The objective of the game is to salvage the self, to not let it lose respect for itself. Now she understands self-respect. That’s what her life has become: a pursuit to earn her self back. She is returned to her world now. To enterprises undertaken in another bubble. A space of reason and practicality that she has to furnish with the living furniture of honest toil and reparation. She feels ready.

PS: It's an excerpt from what I'm working on. Just wrote this bit and felt like putting it up.

i’m so sorry!

I don’t know—maybe I know but don’t quite get it—why Tiger Woods has to apologize to everyone and anyone. What possible crimes could he have committed? His public apology would have been fitting in magnitude had he mortgaged the world’s oil fields to Martians for a romp with nubile, supple aliens.

International sportsmen seem to have made Faustian bargains with their sponsors, their media managers, and the general public. The “with great power comes great responsibility” dictum has been twisted beyond context. How can it be that people are stupid enough to look up to public figures as perfectly moral archetypes?

What a pity Tiger Woods is such a wimp! If his only “problem” is that he likes sex with multiple women, he should just never have married and spared himself the effort of doing it on the sly—given his list, it must’ve been like hiding an elephant in a cupboard.

How wonderful it would’ve been had Tiger Woods just carried on with his business, unapologetic and unperturbed. He would’ve lost the sponsors, half his wealth in divorce settlements, his media-created public image—basically everything extraneous to his actual talent. With a media wave of derision behind him, he would have returned and won a major just like old times. But that was not to be. This world is warped. Here we have to issue apologies and publicly atone to be deemed cured.