The Indoor Managment Rule

When the girl sees them, it was like seeing perfect magazine cut-outs. Her, all picturesque in intelligent new age woman chic. He, sauntering effortlessly through life as a player would through a game that he is eminently good at, and consequently rather bored from. Both effortlessly excelling in everything they deemed worthy of their time. Together, they were a cruel, constant reminder to the rest of the normal world that perfection was obtainable – just not by ground pounders like us.  Ground pounders indeed, mused the girl, as yet again the divine couple swept across the campus canteen like a vengeful god reminding every one else of the ever lost eden.

For unlike Her, the girl was very much the average normal student. Her very unremarkable face had a patch of acne that simply refused to go away, and much to her chagrin and expense in pimple medication, even flares up during times of stress. Of those times, there were plenty. University was not the intellectual flowering that her primary school teachers had once told her. It was difficult, gruuling and when exams came round, almost a herculean effort simply to just pass. And all the while through such daily struggle, you had Him and Her simply waltzing through courses, becoming the darlings of professors and at the same time juggling an ever increasing list of prominent activities outside school. 

Yes, the girl was honesty enough to admit, this was jealousy plain and simple. For all that she might champion fairness and equality in her essays, how ironic that such stark inequality walked the very halls of the university? In fact, one half of perfection even sat beside her for modern history, and at times, writing about the injustices about gender discrimination in the past seem almost ridiculous when sitting beside a person who was simply born better. 

Of course, she had also tried to reason it out. Perfection is imperfect, a stern voice in her head sometimes said. To be human is to embrace imperfection, to be proud of our achne and not so trim bodies. But as the term passed, and He continued to longue beside her during modern history, seemingly asleep but always hand with a sharp, incisive reply to questions posed – that stern voice became less and less convincing, and after a while, altogether comical. 

One day, after class, He talked to the girl. Passing a slim, expensive looking envelope over, he had told her to deliver it to Her, who should be in the old gym. In retrospect, this would have seemed odd to the girl, for the old gym was an abandoned part of school that no one went to. Still at that time, she was fighting a losing battle against His radiant perfection with her indignance at being reduced to a messenger. Obidiently, mesmerised by his angular features, she had agreed and walked out of class in a stupor. 

The stupor did not last long. Walking into the old gym, she saw her, once so divine, now trashing on a dirty gym mat with a legs splayed wide out. On top of her, grunting with the exertion, was none other than the school janitor, his face a contorted sweaty visage of lust. The girl’s nerveless fingers opens the envelope she was holding, and on the slightly scented piece of paper, in perfectly formed letters, were the two words “I know.” 

As she looked at what had once been the paragon of perfection, her eyes leapt from wilfull blindness to vicious critic. She saw the red eyes from late nights spend studying. She delighted in the ruined makeup, barely hiding the first hints of wrinkles. She gloated at tighs that had once seemed perfectly shaped, now wobble around grotesquely. She remembered the rings around his eyes when he had given her the letter, the slight shake in his voice. She remembered his tired looking face. All this, she saw and remembered, as the the images of perfection came crashing down, a cascading shower of broken glass. 

Deep down, she had realised that she had always seen this. That she had always been aware, but had pushed it aside as unnecessary clutter in her mind’s eye. For do we not need out perfect couples to love, admire, hate, and envy? Do we not need something bigger than ourselves to look up to, to curse, to accuse, to be fascinated over? Do we not, above all, need to presume that what we see is the sum of what a person is?

*For those not in law school, the Indoor management rule is a presumption that a person representing a company is acting normally, and that there is no need to enquire further. Above, is a fiction dreamt up by a student soon to take his company law exam*

The Law Student’s Window

You know, sometimes when you look up at the night sky,

And see the stars glinting from its inky darkness

The entire cosmos laid stretching forth, bound only

By the horizon of our own limited perceptions.

 

Or perhaps you’re not so lucky, and you’ve got clouds,

Drawn like a dull red woolen blanket over the infinite

Yet still, vastness that almost defies comprehension

Smokey tendrils of a planet that nurses us sons of carbon.

 

Even the truly unfortunate, would gaze into a man made dawn,

Our civilization’s tiny fingers of light that stab into the beyond

Conjuring echoes of some centuries of life,

Centuries of war, centuries of love.

 

It is only with the strongest and most stubborn of tunnel visions,

That I blind myself to this, and read of how our custodians of justice,

Justify evicting old women, discriminating the different and worse of all,

Training a new generation of students to replace them.