Where did it all go? The wonder and the excitement is all gone, and I’m right here, with time on my hands, with lived experience, with stories to tell, and words don’t come out anymore. And I don’t feel a thing.

I’m perfectly happy with my life. I’m going to spew my well being list now. I know it. You’ve heard it. “I’m surrounded by friends” I will say “I have my health” “Everything is fine in my family (actually, it isn’t, I just ignore the vagaries of age that my grandparents have to face, listen to them while half-suspecting that I’m doing it out of duty, and forget about it the moment the call ends)” “I enjoy my work”. I’m surrounded by natural beauty. I’ve filled my house up with all the things I used to love, and be excited about- books, music, nice wooden furniture (I wonder where I got THAT from). I drive a black car that I’ve jokingly named the “The Bat”, but its not really black because its mudstained and I am planning to AND AM EXCITED ABOUT taking it to a car wash. I’m actually, stupidly, LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING AT A SPECK-LESS CAR BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT I GET EXCITED OVER. What have I become?

But the excitement is gone. When I was 15, and I had way too many things to do, I used to lay awake at night, because my brain produced ideas non-stop. I had a huge accounts book (which used to belong to my grandfather) that was filled with sometimes-overlapping-forever-shifting lists of things that I “wanted to do”. “Play Age of Empires” the list said. “DnD campaign”. “Anton Nocito”- referring to making fresh-fruit sodas from the book “Make your Own Soda” by Anton Nocito. I even did THAT. I made 3 different soda syrups the week before my birthday, and force-fed that to everyone I had invited to my birthday party, placing them in a situation where they HAD to like what I had made. And it was fun. But it was NOT like how things used to be when I was a kid. My lists were wacky and long. My creativity used to reach its crescendo in the weeks before exams, and I used promise myself, again and again, that THIS TIME, it would be different. THIS TIME, after the exam ended, I won’t lose control and actually execute the ideas I had come up with, when procrastinating instead of studying. I used to lay awake at 11pm (that was LATE LATE), tossing and turning, getting up every ten minutes, trying to not wake my grandmother up, and writing down, in an awkward handwriting the latest thing I had come up with, lest I forget it the day after. Oh how the tables have turned now. Now, when I think of something while going to sleep, I’ll (a) tell myself to relax, because I don’t use these ideas anyway, and (b), make a virtue out of it- “not all thought is valuable, if something is important I will remember it, I pride myself on falling asleep without tossing and turning. Oh look how stable I am. How well-kept my life is, how I have HABITS, and DISCIPLINE, and STABILITY, and MENTAL PEACE”. Oh where did the fire go? Alas I don’t even grieve over its ashes anymore. Where did it all go?

I had worlds built up all in my head, grand ideas of pirates in the desert, travelling on sand skiffs, making deals with eldrich entities. Of mercenary corporations that traded in electrum, and dead gods using these corporations to come back to power. The dusty old Terra Campaign manual probably still lies in the almariah in my bedroom at home, with its musty smell, fornicating with the fungus that comes back every year through the walls and the old wooden bookshelf. It was a labour of love, constructed in moments stolen from my usual routine, in the hope that one day, I’d also run an epic dungeons and dragons campaign, and be able to tell the kinds of tales that I’d read about in Chris Perkins blogs. I still remember those titles “Impstinger Must Die” “Constellation of Madness”. Now I have the rulebooks- I bought them off facebook marketplace just because I could afford them, because there were so many fond memories associated with them. I haven’t read through them even ONCE after I bought them, and I shamelessly peer at them. Oh where did all the madness go. I’m not a child anymore.

I remember sitting under the dining table in the old kitchen, taking breaks while studying fluid mechanics. I play a bad rendition of the theme from Pirates of the Caribbean, again and again. I have recordings in my old, hand-me-down blackberry-like phone, of “compositions”, little tunes that I have thought up, with grandoise titles such as “Battle in the skies”. I proudly used to have someone listen to them, knowing that they Aren’t Good Yet, but I know I’ve done something creative, and I’m happy. I can play songs by the ear now, and I have a nice electronic keyboard, and I’ve never tried to compose anything ONCE. “I’ll need training” I’ll think “I should first learn music theory” (which I never do). Once in a while, I’ll play a nice tune, or sing, and I will appreciate the beauty of music. There is a lot of quiet joy. No more feverish excitement for Akshay though.

And I’m fine. I’m worked on this right NOW, because I’m sitting in front of my laptop on the sixth day of my grand month-long “I’ll get better at writing” undertaking, unable to come up with anything imaginative. There’s skill (if I may say so myself), there’s will, but the imagination is gone. All I write about is travel, and lived experience, and “thought pieces”. There’s some humour, sometimes even laugh-out-loud, and some of the writing is real, from the heart. But the imagination is gone. That is the missing ingredient. Whatever happened to putting down nonfiction as “boring”? I’ll still chide myself, sometimes, for becoming this. And then, when I pick up one MORE book about food by Michael Pollan, I’ll tell myself, I shouldn’t FORCE myself to read fiction. If nonfiction is what I’m interested in, then that is what I’ll read.

I’m not angry about this. I’m not even sad. And I’m not angry about not feeling angry, nor sad about not feeling sad. Such is the way of things now. I’ll pontificate about renouncing control, and the absence of free will, and be generally cheerful, because the future is not in my hands anyway. I’ll have the perception of desire, and the perception of pain, and the perception of pleasure, but announce that they’re all equivalent, in essence. I wonder how it feels like to ignore vital, sometimes urgent tasks and obsessively do something that will most definitely jeopardize the current most important thing in my life. I haven’t experienced that in a while.

Things are muted now. There’s color in people and peace and satisfaction, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. I could live all of my childhood dreams, but the only thing that I dream of is a normal, peaceful, healthy life. Oh there are bursts of spontaenity, and I take things as they come, laugh a lot. There’s no painful, patient wait for something that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. No sneaking a peek and living on the edge. A couple of weeks ago, I did to many things in a weekend, felt sleepy at work, and decided that next weekend, I was going to “take it easy” and “relax”. What am I, forty? How did I get old so fast, and why do I like being old?

There’s this song from a scene in hangover, where the main (villan?) and the gang vibe in an elevator, as he hums the lyrics of Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”

But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them

There’s time. And there’s things. And I do things in the time that I have.

Whatever happened to the want?