A letter to myself - The Unbearable Loss of the One Thing I Had

Dear Pranav (circa 2004),

It’s a quiet July night, nearly twenty years later. The world around me is dark and still, save for the hum of the AC and the distant chorus of crickets. I’m sitting by the window of my apartment – yes, our apartment, you'll eventually move to a city far from home – watching the monsoon rain pelt the glass. A glass of bourbon (yes) sits beside my laptop (you will find your poison soon enough). And here I am, writing a letter to you, my younger self. I know, it’s strange. I can almost see the skeptical smile on your face. “A letter, really?” you’d quip, one eyebrow raised in that signature way of yours. Yes, a letter. Because there are things I need to tell you, things I need to confess. And because I miss you. I miss me – the you that I used to be.

I used to have this thing. Not a gadget, not a certificate, not something you could hold or hang on a wall. No, it was subtler than that—elusive, like the punchline to a joke only you and the universe get.

In group discussions, you’d lock eyes with someone—anyone—and just get them. It wasn’t confidence or charm exactly; it was something deeper. I’m writing to you because I need to conduct a post-mortem. On you. On us. Specifically, on the one thing you had that I’ve lost. A bit more mileage, a few stress lines around the eyes, and a few millimeters of lost hairline

Do you remember it? It wasn’t a skill you learned. It was a sense, an extra faculty you were born with, like perfect pitch or a photographic memory. It was a low-frequency hum in your gut, an internal algorithm that processed people. Not their data, but their stories. You could stand in a room and feel the silent frequencies of hope, fear, and unexpressed love vibrating in the air. You could look at a stranger and just know. It was an effortless, intuitive form of pattern recognition that went far beyond anything I could code. It was your superpower.

That’s the hard part: You lost something. By the time you become me, you will have lost the one thing you truly had – that subtle, irreverent spark of creativity that makes you you. I can imagine you scoffing in disbelief. “Lose my creative subtlety? The sarcasm, the innuendos, the silent winks and wordless connections… lose all that? Never!” You’d deny it outright. I know you would, because I remember being you. Denial was our first refuge. And why wouldn’t it be? At 20, you’re absolutely sure that life might change around you, but it can never change who you are. You carry your wit and intuition like a badge of honor. In your mind, growing up doesn’t mean letting go of that playful soul. The air is still thick with the smell of wet earth after a monsoon shower and the sizzle of gupchup from the street vendor outside the RD college gate - and the chicks, of course.

But here I am, living proof that it can happen – slowly, imperceptibly, like a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. You know The Metamorphosis, right? (Of course you do; you skimmed Kafka in second-year English just to impress that girl in class with an offhand literary reference.) Kafka’s protagonist woke up one day as a giant insect – absurd and tragic all at once. My transformation was less dramatic on the outside, but on the inside it felt just as absurd. I didn’t sprout wings or extra limbs; I did grow a pair of cufflinks and a perpetual frown, though. Over years, I changed from that imaginative, perceptive soul into a ruthlessly practical adult. And the strangest part? The world hardly noticed. There was no sudden cinematic moment, no orchestral score warning of impending doom. It was quiet, gradual – unbearable in slow motion.

Do you remember how it all began? Let me take you back for a moment. Think of a muggy afternoon in 2005, in CET Bhubaneswar’s old lecture halls. The ceiling fans creaked, a stray dog snoozed just outside the door, and Naik sir was scribbling incomprehensible equations on the board. You were barely listening – your mind was busy weaving a private joke. Sandeep Sethia (yes Sandy, that guy, your best friend and partner-in-crime then) caught your eye from two benches over. You motioned ever so slightly toward the professor’s atrocious comb-over, and Sandy instantly fought back a laugh. He knew exactly what you were thinking with just a glance. The two of you didn’t need words; a raised eyebrow, a subtle tilt of your head, and the message was sent and received. That was your one thing – your creative subtlety, your unspoken language of humor and insight. It was like telepathy among friends who got you.

Sandy always “got” you (only reason why you found a friend in him. Despite him being a marwari). So did a handful of others – those 3-4 close friends who could ride the wavelength of your wit. Think of Amit Kar, the weird guy whom sometimes only you got. With them, you communicated in sarcastic asides and movie quotes, in the universal language of 90s kids who grew up on the same pop culture. An innuendo dropped at just the right moment, a sly smile, and they’d crack up while everyone else scratched their heads. You took pride in that; it made you feel secretly powerful, like you and your friends shared a world within the world.

Where did that come from, that subtle way of connecting? Perhaps from childhood. Growing up as a 90s middle-class kid in India primed you for it. Think about it: life at home wasn’t always easy or loud. There were struggles – some medical, some emotional – that our family rarely spoke of openly. (You know what I mean; those late hospital visits with Dad, the worried whispers you pretended not to hear, the evenings when Mom sat in the puja room longer than usual, praying with a fragile intensity.) We didn’t have the luxury to be blunt about pain; subtlety became second nature. You learned to read between the lines at home. A tight-lipped smile from Mom meant “I’m holding it together.” A heavy sigh from Dad meant “Not today, maybe tomorrow.” And you, observant little you, developed a sly sense of silent humor within your head as a coping mechanism. When things got tense, you’d mutter a one-liner under your breath – just enough for your brother to hear – and he’d stifle a giggle through his tears. A sarcastic comment here, an exaggerated wink there during a dour family discussion, and suddenly there was a flicker of a smile in the room. You wielded subtle humor like a tiny LED candle in a dark hall – modest in glow, but enough to make a difference.

And oh, the cultural influences that shaped that humor! Early Internet and 90s pop culture were your playground. Remember the first time you heard the scratchy melody of a dial-up modem connecting to the World Wide Web? KRRRR-EEERCHHH (that sound still haunts my dreams). The internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was like Narnia for a curious kid like you. Yahoo chat rooms, Orkut testimonials, MSN messenger, and of course, since you were a teenager, Pink World (iykyk) – those became new stages for your wit and growth. You got exposed to sarcasm in slick American sitcoms (every evening at 7, Star World beamed Friends and Small Wonder into our living room, and you soaked up the timing of Chandler Bing’s jokes and the deadpan of V.I.C.I. the robot). You discovered Fight Club in a pirated VCD your friend lent you – the grunge, the rebellious philosophy hidden in dark humor. You found heroes in those irreverent characters. And yes, you watched John Cusack romcoms on Star Movies late at night when you couldn’t sleep – you hopeless romantic, you. (Don’t deny it; I know about the tissue box that mysteriously emptied around the Say Anything boombox scene.) All of that went into the melting pot of your creativity.

By the time you set foot on CET’s campus in 2003, you were this quietly confident, cheeky young man. A snarky observer of life. Not the loud class clown – oh no, that was never your style – but the one who could drop a dry remark so perfect that it left those in the know in splits. The professors had no idea half the time that you were roasting them in coded language. But your friends knew. Few knew. Whether it was slipping a Lord of the Rings quote into a lab presentation (“One does not simply walk into Viva without preparation,” you’d deadpan, and Sandy would lose it) or reenacting a bit from Hera Pheri in the dorm after lights-out, you lived in a bubble of constant, low-key creativity. Life felt like a series of inside jokes and meaningful glances.

You cherished that about yourself. And you believed it would last forever – that you would last forever. I wish I could spare you the slow fade-out that’s coming. But here’s the truth: over the next two decades, that subtle creative spark will dim. You will watch it flicker and struggle for air, as adult life gradually closes its fist around it. Not snuffing it out entirely – no, that would be too obvious, too kind. Instead, it’ll be a drawn-out smothering. A metamorphosis so gradual you won’t even realize it’s happening until you’re already half-changed. Remember Amit Kar? A dayski trying to look like he belonged. He stood by the makeshift chai stall, talking up (as we called it chatofying), a forced, tight smile plastered on his face. The annual college fest, Xtasy, was your laboratory. A chaotic, three-day explosion of student-led everything. It was there, during our second year, that the superpower showed itself in its purest form.

It starts innocently enough – the denial. When you land your first job (yes, you’ll join the corporate rat race, despite all your youthful disdain for “salary slaves”), you’ll carry your quirky spirit in your top pocket like a lucky pen. You’ll tell yourself nothing’s changed except your mailing address. On day one, you’ll even wear a Star Wars T-shirt under your formal shirt as a secret act of rebellion. I’m still me, you’ll whisper, feeling the cotton of that geeky tee against your skin during a mind-numbing orientation. For a while, you keep up the charade. You find one or two work buddies who also quote Fight Club and Monty Python, and with them you exchange the occasional witty email chain loaded with movie references. You’ll cling to those moments, telling yourself you’re not losing anything. Denial is a hell of a drug, my friend. And we were high on it for a good while.

I traded the chaos of campus for the sterility of cubicles, all in pursuit of that "comfortable life". *Insert Fight Club reference here*: I am Jack's complete lack of surprise—turns out, the first rule of adulting is you don't talk about your dreams; you PowerPoint them into oblivion. I’ve spent nights aligning text boxes on a 350-slide deck at midnight, pretending it makes a difference to anyone. My life became about metrics, A/B testing, KPIs, and dashboards. Every complex, messy, beautiful human impulse got flattened, quantified, and plotted on a regression curve.

The denial curdled into anger. The sarcasm? It started fading first. I’d think of a witty quip in a meeting that could’ve lightened the mood, but I bit it back—too risky, too “unprofessional.” The winks? Those little glints of mischief that made people feel at ease? They were replaced by Zoom stares, where eye contact is about as meaningful as a CAPTCHA test. Cue that recurring scene from Lucifer—when he asks, “What is it you truly desire?”—and I realize I don’t even know anymore. I had become a stranger to my own heart. But those unfinished thoughts? They pile up like unread notifications. Ideas that sparked in college, half-formed philosophies on society, politics, the absurdity of it all—they never grew into lives of their own. Just ghosts, whispering "what if" in the quiet moments. And my job? It’s to build models that predict behavior, to find the signal in the noise. Yet the more I did it, the more I felt that the noise was the whole point. The chaos, the spontaneity, the human-ness of it all—that was what made life colorful, and I’d been filtering it out. Realizing that hurt in a way I can’t quantify.

But reality has a way of breaking through, like a bad plot twist you didn’t see coming. The corporate world doesn’t appreciate subtle. It prefers clear, loud, and obedient. You’ll discover this the first time one of your clever email quips backfires and you have rewrite your whole thing in bullet points (for God’s sakes). Picture this: you’re in a Monday meeting, bored out of your skull, and someone drones on about “blue-sky thinking” and “shifting paradigms.” You, being you, can’t resist. You lean to the colleague next to you and whisper, “One does not simply bring together synergies into paradigm shift.” It’s gold, right? A perfectly timed Lord of the Rings meets corporate-speak joke. Except your colleague doesn’t laugh. He looks at you puzzled – he’s never seen LOTR, he has no idea you just made a killer meme (yes, the word is unheard of yet). Across the table the boss shoots you a glance, because he did hear the word “paradigm” followed by your snort. After the meeting, that colleague politely suggests you “be a bit more serious, maybe?” Ouch. That stings in a way you didn’t expect.

And there it is – the first spark of anger. You feel it, that heat rising in your chest. What’s wrong with these people? Why is your wit met with silence or scorn? You’ll rant to yourself on the drive home about how robotic everyone has become. In the safety of your car, you’ll reenact Tyler Durden’s lines with a sneer: “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive...” You’ll recall how Fight Club made you feel seen – all that rage against consumerist, soul-sucking office life. And oh boy, you will relate. For a while, that anger will be your fuel. You’ll vow not to let “the system” beat you down. Maybe you’ll even take up some rebellious hobby on the side – start scribbling an undercover blog at work, satirizing the daily absurdities around you (strictly anonymous, of course, because you still need that paycheck). Anger can be energizing. It convinces you that you can fight this change, that you can keep your one thing if you just push back hard enough.

I wish I could say your rage against the machine burns forever. But anger, in the end, is exhausting. It’s not sustainable fuel; it chars everything to ash, including you. After a couple of years, the fight dims. Yelling into the void (or into a secret blog no one reads) doesn’t stop the void from yawning back.

After the anger comes the desperate, pathetic scramble of bargaining—the third stage. It’s the frantic negotiation with a universe that isn’t listening, the litany of “what ifs” and “if onlys.” I tried to strike deals with myself. If I can just slip the word “storytelling” into this PowerPoint deck, maybe the old me will come back for a moment, I thought. I even signed up for a Toastmasters program to “re-spark my spontaneity,” then quit after two sessions because the forced wackiness felt exactly like a corporate team-building exercise (and I’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime). Each attempt to revive that spark felt like grabbing at smoke. This is where you try to strike a deal with life, a desperate last attempt to hold on to that creative subtlety while still “growing up” as expected.

The biggest bargain, the one that haunts me, started with you. It was the great unexpressed love of our college life. You know who I mean. I don’t even need to write her name. You were a classic case study in the psychology of unspoken affection. You were always around her, a constant, protective satellite, but always maintaining a safe, platonic orbit. You remembered the small things—the name of her favorite author, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating. These were your safe, indirect expressions of a love too terrifying to confess. Our bargain was always with the future. “If I get a good campus placement, then I’ll have the confidence to tell her.” “If I get into that MBA college, then I’ll have the standing to approach her.” The goalposts were always moving. You were negotiating with a version of yourself that never arrived, deferring the vulnerability until you had achieved some external validation that you thought would make you worthy.

You’ll tell yourself, Fine, I’ll play along. I’ll become the efficient Data Analyst by day – the guy who talks in machine learning jargon and meets deadlines and even uses corporate buzzwords unironically. But (you promise yourself in a whisper) I’ll keep the creative spark alive after hours. So you compartmentalize. By 9-to-5, you wear the company lanyard and a polite smile. You laugh at the boss’s stale jokes. You discuss interest rates by the water cooler. Then in the evenings, you switch on your old laptop at home and try to write witty short stories, or edit that indie screenplay you once dreamed of. You basically try to live a double life: Clark Kent by day, and… well, a very low-key, unknown writer by night. You fail, of course! The world is getting to you.

For a little while, this bargain seems to work. There’s a relief in thinking you’ve outsmarted the system. Once a year or two you meet up with the old college gang (yes, you all stay in touch, more or less – growing apart and coming together in waves). On those nights, sitting at a roadside chai stall, someone will say, “Remember that prof with the comb-over?” and you have no idea since they went to a B-School but you started your job as a software coolie. But, there will be nostalgic remembrances to the old days, loaded with CET memories, Hera Pheri punchlines and 2000s song lyrics. Your friends roar with laughter; one even spits out their whiskey in a fit when you perfectly mimic that iconic Hera Pheri scene (“Utha le re deva!” you cry dramatically, and everyone howls). Of course, it never happened, it was all in your mind. Yet, in those moments you feel alive again. You think, See? I haven’t lost it. I just keep it tucked away most of the time.

But as the years march on, those moments become rarer. Friends get busy; you get busy. The bargaining begins to fail. Weekday evenings that you promised to devote to creative pursuits start getting consumed by sheer exhaustion. It’s hard to write clever dialogue or paint or compose music at 11 pm after a day of back-to-back meetings and a long commute through traffic. You’ll try – oh, you will – but you’ll find yourself dozing off with the laptop still open to a blank Word document. You’ll make new deals with yourself: “Not tonight, I’m tired. I’ll work on it this weekend.” But then weekends fill up with chores, family obligations, or just the need to recover. One compromise at a time, your grand bargains crumble.

I think of your superpower now as My Precious. In the beginning, it was a beautiful, powerful ring, a gift that let you see the hearts of others. But the corporate world, my Mordor, demanded I use it for pragmatic ends—to predict market trends, to optimize ad spend. And the more I used it for these tasks, the more it twisted me. The hopeful Frodo who set out from the Shire was gone. In his place was a grasping, paranoid Gollum, hunched over his laptop in the dark, muttering to himself.

And so arrives the depression – The Trauma of the Mean – though you won’t recognize it as such at first. By the time bargaining failed, I was left alone with reality. Depression — the trauma of the mean — set in. “Mean” as in average, mediocre, normal. The crushing realization that I had become just another cog in the machine, a painfully average guy with a fading spark, hit me like a sucker punch. The superpower that once defined me was now a faint memory, and the world seemed dimmer for it.

It’s subtle (ironically). It comes on like an evening fog: slowly, until you suddenly realize you can’t see the stars anymore. The first time you truly notice what’s missing will break your heart in a quiet, profound way. I remember my moment vividly. It was a drizzly evening (rain seems to bookmark our life, doesn’t it?). I was cleaning out my drawer and I found an old college notebook – the one wrote silly limericks and caricatures of professors. I sat on the floor flipping through it, and there we were: doodles of Naik sir breathing fire like a dragon, a page where Sandy had written a mock love letter to the cracked classroom wall (to put it in a classy way), a half-finished short story I had written in the margins about a student who runs away to become a stand-up comic. It hit me with a physical force: I didn’t recognize that kid anymore. The one who scribbled jokes in the middle of lectures, who harbored secret dreams of stage lights and applause. I hadn’t seen him in years. I had been so busy being the “adulting Pranav” – the one with the stable job and a retirement plan – that I hadn’t noticed you fading away. In that moment, sitting on the floor holding that tattered notebook, I cried. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wept like someone mourning a dear friend… or mourning oneself.

That’s what it was, really: grief. A slow, unspoken grief for the creative, subtle soul I lost. They talk about the Kübler-Ross model – the five stages of grief – and you know what? I went through every single one of them while losing you. Denial, anger, bargaining… and now here I was, squarely in depression, grieving a part of me that felt as good as dead. The weight of it pinned me down. For days (who am I kidding – it was months, nay, years), I walked around with an invisible shroud of sadness. To outside eyes everything was “fine” – I did my work, I made small talk, I smiled when I was supposed to. But inside, I felt hollowed out. The jokes didn’t come to me anymore, not naturally. The innuendos that used to dance on my tongue turned to ash. When a witty thought did flicker in my mind, I smothered it before it escaped – “What’s the point? No one will get it,” I’d think. It was easier to stay quiet. And so I did. Meetings went by where I said nothing except factual, work-related stuff. Days, months and years went by devoid of any spark or mischief. Imagine that, me without a sarcastic comment in 24 hours. Unthinkable for you now, I know. But it happened.

I became a muted version of myself. A grayscale image where there used to be Technicolor. And dear God, it was unbearably lonely. Not because I was physically alone – I was surrounded by colleagues, family, even a loving partner by then (oh yes, spoiler alert: you do find love, but that’s a story for another letter). The loneliness was inside. It was the loneliness of not being understood, not being seen for who you are. Because how could anyone see that old quirky Pranav in me when I myself couldn’t see him anymore?

But hold on – this letter isn’t meant to drown you (or me) in sorrow. I promised a metamorphosis, not a collapse. And metamorphoses don’t end in death; they end in change. This is where acceptance slowly enters. Acceptance came to me like a gentle dawn after a long, moonless night. It wasn’t an epiphany in a single moment; it was many small moments that accumulated. One of those moments was that evening on the floor with the notebook, as painful as it was. You see, after the tears dried, I found myself smiling at one line in that notebook – a ridiculously exaggerated statement of me in college (no mystery here; i was surrounded by girls in love with me). It was so silly, so me. I chuckled, genuinely. And I realized that that Pranav was still alive in me, buried under the everyday grind, yes, but alive. I had proof in my hands that he existed. And if I truly wanted, maybe I could invite him back for a bit.

Acceptance didn’t mean resigning to having lost myself forever. It meant accepting that change is real, that I had indeed changed – and then finding a way to make peace with it. I began to understand that life had forced me to shed some parts of myself, but maybe not completely destroy them. Perhaps I couldn’t be the sarcastic kid 24/7 anymore – that’s true. But I could still be him in pockets of time, with the right people, in the right places. And maybe the new “pragmatic corporate” me wasn’t all bad either. He brought stability, he got things done, he took care of the people who depended on him. There’s value in that person too.

So, I started merging the two. I accepted that Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 Pranav puts on his headphones and talks about KPIs, but Saturday (and off work) Pranav can wear his old Star Wars tee and crack inside jokes with old friends. I accepted that I might never make a living as a stand-up comic or writer – and that’s okay – but I can still write for myself, like I’m doing right now, pouring humor and heart into words that only a few people (you, the Biryani gang, maybe 1-2 others) will truly understand. I stopped seeing our transformation as tragic. Instead, I began to see it as a story – a long, winding story of a boy who grows up and almost loses himself, only to find new facets of who he is. Not a tragedy, perhaps a bittersweet indie film with a hero’s journey of its own.

Pranav, I won’t lie to you: even in acceptance, there’s a lingering ache. I will forever miss the ease with which you connected with the world through a cheeky smirk and a well-timed wink. That was your superpower. Living without wielding it freely is hard. But here’s the hopeful twist: the people who matter, they still see that spark in me. Those close friends – my ragtag cohort of mischief-makers – they never really left. Life scattered you all across cities and continents, but every once in a while we find our way back together, usually on WhatsApp cracking old jokes, or at reunions where we stay up till 3 AM laughing about things that would sound absurd to anyone else. They still call me out when a quip is on the tip of my tongue and I hesitate – “Arre, bol na! Don’t be so uptight, yaar!” – and I’m coaxed back into being that witty guy. With them, I feel seen again. In their eyes, I’m still Pranav, their Pranav from college – maybe a bit rounder in the middle and greyer at the temples (yeah, that happens too – invest in good shampoo), but essentially the same friend they know and love. And if they can see me under all the corporate camouflage, then maybe I’m not truly lost.

I’ve realized something important: growing up doesn’t mean we must kill our inner child or our creative soul. It often feels like that – like the world demands that sacrifice – but the truth is, we allow it to happen out of fear of jedgement or just simple fatigue of life. I allowed my spark to dim because I thought I had to “fit in” and “be serious” to shoulder adult responsibilities. Perhaps I did, to some extent. But maybe I could have fought harder to keep that light glowing. I don’t know. No one gives you a manual for this stuff. We had no real role models for balancing creativity and pragmatism – who in our family or neighborhood did? We were the first internet generation, figuring it out as we went along. Our parents taught us love and hard work, but they couldn’t teach us how to keep alive a flame they themselves were taught to douse in order to survive. There’s no blame here – it’s just how life unfolds.

So, here I am, writing to you in full acceptance of who I have become – the good and the not-so-good. I’ve become that pragmatic, responsible adult we once mocked. I play by the rules more often than not. I schedule my days on a calendar, I talk about insurance policies, I say things like “Let’s circle back on this” without a hint of irony (cringe-worthy, I know!). But I haven’t forgotten you. In fact, I carry you within me, tucked away like a beloved book in the back of a crowded shelf. You’re a part of me that I cherish and revisit when I need to remember who I am. Writing this letter, I can feel you in every sentence – that subtle humor and intuition coloring my words. That means you’re still here. I may have lost the constant presence of the one thing I had, but not its memory. Not its legacy.

Twenty years later, I want you to know: I’m okay. We’re okay. Life turned out to be a strange rollercoaster – not the straightforward rom-com or heroic adventure we imagined. More like one of those dark comedies with a heart of gold. There were scenes of pure farce, like an episode of Lucifer with witty one-liners about the absurdity of human life. There were moments of fight and fury where I felt like the narrator in Fight Club, stuck in a consumerist nightmare wanting to break free. There were tender, cinematic scenes too – like something out of a John Cusack movie – quiet conversations under starry nights, long drives with music that makes your chest swell, even a grand romantic gesture or two (don’t worry, I won’t spoil those for you; just know that you will have your “boombox moment,” minus the actual boombox). And yes, there was the occasional comedic punchline straight out of Hera Pheri that kept me laughing when things got rough. Through it all, through all the roles I’ve had to play, I never completely let go of the real Pranav. He’s older now, a bit scarred, a bit wiser (hopefully), and perhaps not as outrageously witty as before. But he’s here, writing to you with a smile of recognition.

I won’t patronize you with advice – God knows, back then we hated unsolicited advice. I won’t tell you to “hold on to your passion no matter what” because life is more complicated than a motivational quote on a poster. What I will say is this: cherish who you are for as long as you can. Be aware that time and responsibility will tug at you, trying to steal that sparkle. Fight it if you can. Bend if you must. But know that even if that one precious thing is lost for a while, it’s not irretrievable. People will enter (or re-enter) your life who remind you of you. Circumstances will arise that ignite that creative subtlety again, even if just in brief flickers. And those flickers will feel like home.

If by some magic this letter actually reached you in 2005, I wonder how you'd react. I picture you reading it in your room at midnight, headphones on playing Green Day softly (yes, I remember our late-night playlists). You’d probably laugh at me a bit – so dramatic, future me, take a chill pill! – and then maybe you’d get a little misty-eyed (I know you; you’re secretly sentimental under that sarcastic shell). You might even publish this to show the gang, to say “Look, some old version of me thinks I’m gonna go boring. What say, should we mess with him?” And you all would have a good laugh and another round of chai. That’s okay. Laugh at me. I hope you do. Because that means you still have it – that fearless wit, that humorous defiance. You’ll need every ounce of it for the journey ahead.

Alright, I think I’ve rambled enough for one letter. It’s nearly morning now; the rain has stopped, and a pale blue light is seeping into the sky. It seems I’ve talked my way to a sort of emotional closure here – funny how writing to you turned into writing for me. I feel lighter. Maybe we’ve both found some closure in this conversation across time.

Take care of yourself, kid. Enjoy those carefree college days. Treasure the folks (even Sandy) and those precious friends – they truly are the ones who will understand this letter in the end, the ones who’ll stand by you through every version of yourself. Give them an extra tight hug next time you see them, will you? (Trust me, twenty years on, you’ll wish you had hugged people more.)

And whenever you sense even a hint of life trying to snatch away your spark, do me one favor: wink. A silent, knowing wink at the universe, as if to say, “I see what you’re doing, and I’m still here.” Our little signature move. I promise, I’ll feel it – even all these years later, I’ll feel that wink and remember to do the same.

Yours truly,
Pranav (circa 2025 - the older, if not necessarily wiser, you)

P.S. If this letter got a tad too sentimental or filmy in parts, feel free to deduct 50 rupees for overacting. 😉