What debris we leave behind when sprinting forward

Not long ago my sister asked me if I still sketched in my spare time. With those simple words, she threw a heavyweight's killer left. I haven't drawn regularly, save the doodles that fill my notebook during weekly meetings, since I tossed art class following the ninth grade.

When I was prolific, I always kept a sheet of paper beneath my school work so I could draw in an instant if an idea arose.

Here's a skill that was once so much a part of my life that I never imagined myself without it. Across the years, it became a language so foreign that even sketching seems absurd. What I would produce would display poor quality (as it has every time I've tried in recent years) that it all becomes futile.

I see guitar playing and poetry writing as future victims of the same blight; whether it's too late to resurrect them remains undetermined.

Chalk it up as a lesson in how hobbies and beloved pastimes regress into "things that I used to do."