If she’d ever been able to sling written words with passion, building monuments from them, she had lost that ability long ago, given it up, like her salvation, choosing to dumb herself down, mentally and morally, for men not worth a damn.

Though superficially the envy of others, how bad must her upbringing have been to turn her into someone with so little sense of reality, so little that was real about herself, actively choosing a perpetual childhood enslaved to a surrogate father not worth a damn, just another no one echoing whatever she was told? 

She had passed up her own salvation, instead choosing those who could never give her any, seeking the perks of life that did not matter over her own soul, her own claim to honesty. She believed herself immune to karma. Karma laughed at her arrogance ... and waited.

And, yet, what could be a greater punishment than selling oneself out for nothing, for what, in the end, made no difference and could neither fill her soul nor be taken into death?