Adrenaline Junkie...

He locked his front door and left for college….

He reached and deliberated if he wanted to attend the day’s first lecture….

He decided to bunk… again.

A student of engineering, he was typically unenthusiastic about academics… only more, much more, than even the worst of his peers.

During the previous semester he had attended fewer lectures than the fingers of a blind butcher.

And here into the second week of another section of his college life, he was at it again.

He had attended one out of thirty-five lectures this week… and he was planning on bunking seven more, without more than a seconds thought.

He went to the canteen to grab a bite to eat, before his long tedious day ahead… just like every other.

He ended up staying there for over an hour playing cards with friends that came and went… not one of whom bunked more than one class at a stretch.

They all joked about his reckless habit, they thought it was funny. They simply didn’t understand why he always did it… and frankly, he didn’t either. Not entirely at any rate.

He was tired of the monotonous and unchanging existence that he had been enduring for the nineteen years of his life. He was simply past all caring and desperately wanted to make things different… anyway he could.

So he stopped attending lectures, and always did the first thing that he thought of. He did everything impulsively, recklessly and thoughtlessly....

He was aware that he was gifted. People usually told him that as a matter of fact and he accepted it as such.

He was aware that if he were to focus he might actually excel in the field he chose.

He knew he had all that was required to make it to the top in programming and hacking… the career he had adopted.

The only thing he lacked was interest… in anything.

He wasn’t lazy… he occasionally spent vast amounts of effort into things that caught his fancy… the rest of the time he slouched through his days….

He could write, but he did not particularly want to….

He could hack, but it didn’t really interest him….

He loved photography but he felt it was too much of a bother….

He could play the guitar, but he would rather listen to music than make his own….

He was gifted in sports, but never bothered to hone his skills….

He was god’s perfect example of utter waste….

Today, he skipped all his classes once more and spent his day playing cards and cricket… both lightly… he wasn’t really into either….

He simply did not take anything seriously… ever….

He decided to hang out with some friends at a mall after they had attended the day’s classes. He promised a friend that he would be attending his band’s performance at a local venue in the evening. He was aware he had to return home early to clean up before his parents arrived….

He was clueless about just how he was going to spend his afternoon, let alone his life….

So he went out with his friends… he remembered the show he was supposed to attend and decided to ditch them… he got plain tired from the tediousness of making decisions and decided to go home instead. Then he got a call…

One of his pieces was getting published in a cool upcoming magazine…. He was aware of it, in a vague sort of way. The publishers wanted him to attend their story-reading session, being one of the writers. It was a pretty big honor… so he decided that he had nothing better to do anyway….

He left his friends… apologized to the one whose performance he would miss and informed his parents that he would be late…. He left for the event.

He reached late and stumbled into the hall, ready to sit through some reading and head back home… but that was not to be….

He was effectively dunked onto the stage by the organizers, to share the spotlight with his far more esteemed counterparts….

He resigned himself to trying not to meet anyone’s eyes and inspecting the ceiling… but even that was not to be….

He would soon have to read his work out loud to all present, and answer any questions they might ask!

The realization made his heart race… after a long time of lethargy and boredom, of trying to find something that would make him feel alive, he was suddenly, unexpectedly, feeling more alive than he had felt for a period longer than he could remember….

He was no novice to stage performances having sung as a kid, and debated extensively till a year back… but this time it was out of the blue…. He did not want to become a laughing stock….

The blood pounded through his veins, he could actually hear a thudding in his ears, and he was acutely, painfully aware of his surroundings….

In that instant he realized that this thrill was what he had always been after… and the crazier and weirder his actions to seek it out had become, the more numbed he had grown to the sensation….

He read his piece, answered a few queries about his work, and interacted with some of the assembled guests… and he left.

He returned home an ounce wiser than how he had left it….

He was still lost how to achieve the sensation again… but at least he had made a start….

He had realized that in some inexplicable way he had become something closely resembling an Adrenaline Junkie