#62 Not everything is lost
We came back from our native and vacation last Sunday. I have not resumed writing. A strange inertia has held me. It feels more like an inability. It’s like I have never known how to write. Like I am a different person now.
I was not ver well when we left for Hyderabad. The illness has re-calibrated me, it seems. This, when I am sitting down and writing, doesn’t seem familiar. My room is closed. Like before. There is a sound. A sound of the silence. The kind you hear when you go to a new place and encounter an unknown empty space. Or, like that room which hasn’t had any visitors since long. And, none of its objects have been moved since a long time. It’s like you have encroached that space, which was occupied by silence and emptiness and now, you can hear its dense existence.
This dissipates. Gradually and eventually. When you inhabited the space for long. When you get used to it. When you are a part of it. I have experienced this before. Sometimes at our native home. In a visit after a long time. But never in this house.
As I write after a long gap, I am consumed by some questions. Do I really like writing? “Yes and No”. Do I want to write? “Yes”. Does writing come naturally to me? “No”
Writing is aspirational to me. It won’t fit many tests if I were to evaluate its space and viability in my life.
I know when I resorted to writing in the past when it was more occasional. When I was consumed by monotony. It has been my answer or my search for answer to the dissatisfaction of an uninspired life.
Whenever there is a change, like in vacations, it fills me in a way which is also not forever just like everything else. This sense of fulfilment and emptiness tends to be cyclical.
Writing is not like my second nature. It keeps going away and coming back to me. Rather, I keep going away and coming back to it. It doesn’t go anywhere. It is still. Somewhere within. But it does feel like that accompanies me. Not because it is very dear to me. It’s the sheer nature of its existence. I am so glad I am not related to it like one tends to be with the world around oneself. It doesn’t have to be like an association that can also wither away. Like, out of sight and out of mind.
God! This was such a common occurrence and a feeling in college, I remember. After vacation. So many relationships would change or end around vacations.
I remember, in my school, after vacation, I would behave in a certain way and I would get a comment from another fellow about how I had just been back from my Naani’s place and I would be back to “normal” in some time.
This changed in workplaces. In school, one tended not to be so mature and smart about things. One was also more sensitive. Workplaces reward the opposites. And, any kind of vacation or time away would easily get buried in the computer screens among a sea of people sitting together but not with each other.
When that happened, writing came to the rescue. And, suddenly, it felt, not everything was lost.