No one drinks anymore

There exists in every expatriate life a kind of delusion: that the place we leave behind will remain suspended in our absence, like a snow globe waiting to be shaken back to life upon our return. We expect the places we left to wait for us, the selves we once inhabited easily slipped back into like a well-worn jacket. But time is never so accommodating. It moves forward with indifferent momentum, dragging with it the structures we thought solid, eroding the rituals we held sacred.

Malaysia was once a place where excess felt inevitable, where recklessness carried weight through camaraderie and the quiet assurances of intimacy.

The last time I was in Malaysia, we drank. We drank until our voices frayed, until the conversation looped back on itself, until bottles of Macallan 18 were emptied and more were ordered, as if it were the only logical conclusion.

Now, it seems, no one drinks. Everyone I texted has suggested a morning coffee or breakfast. They wake at six to play tennis. They talk about stretching. Someone even proposed “meeting up for a game.”

My mornings are full and my nights are empty.

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I have never found any joy in physical exertion, but I especially loathe tennis. As a child, I had a coach who would stand at the net with his arms crossed and sigh in a way that suggested a kind of existential exhaustion every time I sent a ball, with impressive velocity, out of court. Which was often.

I started with badminton, which meant that my body had already committed itself to a different set of laws—an entirely different physics of movement, an entirely different expectation of how air and resistance and string tension conspire to direct a ball’s trajectory. A shuttlecock is a far more forgiving thing than a tennis ball, which does not glide or hover but insists on a cruel, obedient adherence to Newtonian motion.

The tennis lessons lasted a year. I never adjusted. These days, whenever I’m forced to partake in this hideous activity, I still swing up, the ball still sails out, my tennis partners still register, with varying degrees of restraint, minor exasperation that takes me straight back to my coach’s sighs. And so I stand there, self-conscious, vaguely humiliated, wondering why we are all conspiring to uphold the fiction that I am someone who plays sports.

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Maybe it’s because I’m on the cusp of a milestone birthday that I’m preoccupied with the peculiar choreography of aging, this dance we do around the idea of propriety and maturity.

Adulthood is often framed as a fixed point, a destination where one arrives, unpacks, and settles in—a life measured in mortgages, pensions, early mornings, and the quiet satisfaction of stability. You develop an affinity for tennis.

But is it real? And if so, has everyone else arrived while I’ve been left behind? We used to be moving in tandem, following the same trajectory. At what point did my contemporaries decide gut health was a personality trait?

Adulthood to me suggests not growth but an ending—a quiet surrender, the final erosion of hunger, the acceptance of ease as virtue. A kind of death.

I have tried to embrace it. To join the league of sensible people who measure their worth in assets and obligations. But there is something in me—some vestigial defiance—that resists, that suspects ease is just another form of surrender. I don’t want to settle into a familiar rut. I still want new experiences. I want the sharp hit of a frozen Tiger on a too-warm night, the electric possibility of conversations unspooling past midnight, the sense that I am still in motion, still capable of veering off course. I do not want my life reduced to a series of tidy conclusions.

Somewhere along the way, we internalized this idea of maturity being the death of impulse, the gentle euthanasia of desire. As if wisdom could be measured in early bedtimes and moderate alcohol consumption. As if the mark of advancement was how successfully we'd learned to bore ourselves.

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I’m not looking to recapture old times exactly; I just miss having someone to drink with. Two drinks, maybe three. The easy kind of drinking, the kind that carries the night forward, that turns the edges soft.

Instead, I find myself in brightly lit Chinese restaurants at 10 a.m., sipping Pu'er, talking about potty training. I feign interest in property values and second homes, and hold out hope for more salacious tidbits.

I know what I’m really chasing is the feeling of a particular moment in time: that sweet spot of early adulthood when possibility still felt infinite and consequences seemed distant and theoretical. I’ve chased this temporal ghost across continents, convinced I can recapture it if I just find the right dive bar, the right company, the right amount of ethanol in my blood.

But while I was away, time worked its quiet alchemy on the places and people I left behind. Friends evolved into arguably better versions of themselves. This change feels like a betrayal—not because they've chosen differently, but because they've chosen at all. I’m now forced to confront my own relationship with time, with growing older, with the persistent myth that I can somehow exist simultaneously in multiple versions of my little life.

The expatriate's curse is to exist between worlds, but also between times—carrying versions of places and people that no longer exist, except in memory. We become custodians of ghosts, archivists of moments that have already slipped past.

Yet there's something magnificent in the resistance, in refusing to go gentle into that good responsible night. Perhaps what we're really preserving isn't the past itself, but the spirit of possibility it represented—the belief that life shouldn't be a gradual dimming, a slow surrender to sensibility, but rather a continuous rebellion against the prescribed patterns of aging.

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There is a saying, Lao Tzu, I think: Let go or be dragged.

The inevitability of change is not a revelation, but what is rarely acknowledged is the grief that accompanies it, a betrayal woven into the very fabric of time. To let go is to recognize the dissolution of something once intimate, to admit that what we cherished has become unrecognizable.

And yet, I have always preferred the drag—the resistance, the refusal, the insistence that meaning is something to be fought for. There is dignity, or at least a certain defiance, in rejecting the narrative that smooths out the edges, that renders life a series of logical steps toward an ever-diminishing horizon.

Forty is not an end but a recalibration. I do not believe in sensibility as a virtue, nor do I find solace in the measured disciplines of adulthood. I want movement, friction, intoxication—not just the literal kind but the kind that unsettles, that upends, that reminds you that you are still awake in your own life. To hit a ball over a net is not release, nor is it enough for me. I have no interest in the quiet surrender of contentment.

I had imagined Malaysia would remain a tether, something I could return to at will, a past self waiting patiently for my arrival. But the past does not wait. It unravels in your absence, reshapes itself without permission.

To return is not to recover. The places we love do not hold their shape, and neither do we. This is the condition of time, of memory, of presence itself. And yet, in the face of this inevitability, I still want more. I want the burn of whiskey, the weight of a night unspooling without an endpoint, the sharp relief of knowing that, for now, I am still here.

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Soundtrack: Najee - Tokyo Blue