A Discourse on the Waning of Creative Fervor

 Freshly out of high school... no that's a lie. One year into my Literature program, when a virus was fulfilling its world-domination dreams and people had real work like ironing newspapers and banging steel plates in the hopes that Microscopic Brother would leave them alone, I was home-upskilling my baking game, attending God knows how many Literature webinars and endlessly scrolling through social media. The high school poet in me had since died, thanks to a sudden overload of books to finish reading for class. Therefore, when a random writing prompt on the internet asked me to write a regret letter to myself, I jumped onto the idea, blissfully ignorant of how many I had. 

I documented it. Whatever regrets the 19-year-old girl had, she wrote them down in bullet points- a snippet of which is uploaded on one of many social media platforms I manage. Now the letter ran a decent length but we shall discuss here the conclusion of it which reads thus: 

I hope the diya reading this years later has lesser regrets than these. I hope she has come to terms with the ones on this list.

Love,

Diya at 19

I am truly surprised that she knew at 19 that there would never come a time with no regrets and still funnily enough, thought the 23-year-old version of that teenager would have that list figured out. Now whether to call her naive or romantic is for the reader to decide but here are my 2 cents- she loved Literature beyond what it could do for her in 10 years' time. Funny how this was just 4 years and not a generation ago.

Am I here to update that list and add a 'Diya at 23' section to it? Oh, absolutely not. No matter how comfortable I get with rich/bald/ monochrome people spying on my life, they and a few hundred of you would hopefully never have the liberty of going through that sad list. 

However, I shall still hold a whine-apalooza for the paintertaintment of my readers.

Firstly, I think it is of grave importance to note that 23-year-old Diya does not have fewer regrets and has definitely not come to terms with the 2020 list. Does she have more? Maybe :/ But we shall only discuss the single most important and tragic regret of all time today.

Last week my family and I drove down to Kerala for a short staycation (do not be fooled, that's the word people use to justify a boring vacation). However, what concerns me is the drive, for the singular reason of looking out the window and saying, “Wowww so pretttyyy”. Here is a sample:

As I stared out the window, lost in the scenery, snapping the occasional pictures, my father broke the silence: "So, why'd you quit writing poetry? Isn't this the kind of 'nature stuff' that gets great poets all fired up?"

First of all Dad, the rare poetry I write will have me grounded at 23, I can’t have you reading that. And we are way past the 1800s to be inspired by nature. Did I proceed to give him a lecture on Romantic poetry that he dismissed within the first sentence? Yes. Moreover, Dad, all I see when I look out now is how in a decade or two, I will probably not see it, thanks to all the climate change issues so many of you are denying. 

Someone might say that 5 years of Literature killed the creative and gave birth to the cynicist in me and they would be absolutely right. Wry.

Updated regret: Long lost Romantic

In a twisted way, he is right. I have written poetry on trees and clouds and Poems and cathedrals and televisions and whatnot. Comical as it may be, 15-year-old Diya was at her peak with creative juices doing the somersaults- everything inspired her. Now it’s an occasional ripple in a stagnant pond. A regret indeed.

I’m just 23, and my brain hasn’t even formed fully yet. What possible earth-shattering regrets could I have? I know we’re all saying this now if you’ve come all this way. Earth-shattering or not, regrets have a way of leeching the living soul out of you. Sometimes momentarily but in first person POV, it does feel like if the subject matter was not a regret, you’d have had your whole life figured out by now. Yeah yeah, I’m just 23, I don’t have to have my life figured out (insert you're-still-young motivation). But let’s face it, if you are expected to choose your subject stream at 15 and college specialisation at 17 then 23 seems like the ripe age to know what to retire doing. (This is another rabbit hole we’ll jump into later), but to truly know for sure, it’d take at least a genie or two to help with those answers. 

Hear me out though, these regrets are legitimate. I was 12 when Enid Blyton entered my life. And since then, I have read multiple problematic and unproblematic authors. Some, multiple times because the stars aligned and I had nothing better to do. (In my defence, Will, Jem and Tessa had a sad sad story to tell). I enjoyed this reading business so much that I decided to do that for 5 more years and get 2 pieces of paper called 'Degrees' out of it. However, leisure reading has been a distant dream in these years. I barely read now. I thought buying a physical book would change that but 'A Little Life' has been quietly gathering dust for over six months, with only three pages ever turned.

In the future, will I barely do what brought me here? Surely a regret.

Now, there has formed, over time, a constant variable in my poetic adventures, without which I am simply unable to formulate meaningful verse- heartbreak (or in layman's terms, pain). I make this statement after careful and strenuous energy went into writing heartwarming and calming poetry in vain. Moreover, Aristotle placed tragedy over comedy and he is Greek so he cannot be wrong.🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷🤷

The grapes I ate calling out to the universe for specific wishes under the table at midnight on New Year's this year, worked in varying degrees and now has me desperately wanting to write happy, heartwarming poetry about beautiful Beginnings until the end of doomsday (HiGen). Yet no amount of frenzied desperation produces even a singular verse that does not elicit second-hand embarrassment. (I will still write it because I am stubborn like that). But when did melancholy become my muse and how do I pray for more verse inspiration if heartbreak is in store? An unexpected regret.

I believe that for the most part, this gutwrenching regret of not writing poetry (or anything else) led me to the glorious path of publicizing my inner feelings in prose form  - as unimportant or boring as they may be occasionally. Nevertheless, staying true to the overarching mood of the world, you will always find tragedy, heartbreak, pain and the dead and decaying here... with a sprinkle of nonchalant sarcasm of course. But if there were ever a genie who would grant me my 3 generous wishes, here's the list: 

1. a world with no wars
2. a job
3. a teleportation machine

Amen.