Memories of Ink and Loss

Tentacles.

He sees them everywhere.

Not literal, but not imagined either..  

Ephemeral as breath on glass, real as grief.

They stretch between people—glimmering cords, pale filaments of connection, draped between shoulders, wrapped tight around wrists, trailing behind like spider silk in a gentle wind. He watches them form, stretch, sometimes snap. They writhe when people laugh. Coil when they touch. Knot when they fight and don’t mean it.

Sometimes he sees one fray at the edges, unraveling quietly as someone walks away. He sees them knotted around lovers’ hands, trailing between parents and children like leashes. Not something anyone else sees, he know that.

He always sees.

When he turns to look at himself though…

Nothing.

No filaments.  

No ties.  

He stopped trying to explain this to people years ago. Once, he told a girl on a date. She laughed, gently, and said he was “just sensitive.” As if it were something that would pass. As if he were something that would pass.

He did, of course. So did she.

He didn’t talk about them after that.

---

He lives alone. Not unhappily, not quite. He has his habits. A particular tea with orange peel in the mornings. A raincoat that’s more memory than fabric. He speaks aloud only to answer the kettle when it whistles.

He’s content. This is what life is, he tells himself.

He doesn’t go out much, except on Sundays, when the city is quietest. He walks early, along the water, where the fog stays low and softens the buildings until they look more like memories than structures.

That’s where he sees the strongest filaments reaching across the city—woven between old friends with shared secrets, or close, between strangers helping strangers with groceries or a map. Always around others.

Never himself.

He’s grown used to the absence. That, he tells himself, is what adulthood means.  

Adjusting to absences.  

Folding them like laundry.  

Putting them in drawers and naming them fine.

Then he meets someone.

A man. Soft-voiced. Lopsided smile. Lives on the north side of town, where the trains don’t quite stop anymore, and the trees lean like they’ve heard too much. He was married once, but isn’t any more. He lives alone. He’s content.

He walks in the mornings too, when the city is quietest.

They talk about stupid things at first.  

The smell of rain on hot pavement.  

Old vending machines.  

Why sadness always tastes like pennies.

He doesn’t try to explain the tendrils.

Not this time.

He just listens. Speaks, when it feels safe. He doesn’t notice that he smiles more now. That he walks slower, takes different paths. That he checks the clock without feeling the bite of it.

They meet again.

And again.

On the sixth time—he counts them, not because he’s keeping track but because he’s afraid they’ll stop—he catches his reflection in a window.

At first, nothing.  

But then, just over his shoulder—

A shimmer. A curl. A reach.

Thin, pale, almost translucent.

A filament.

Not many. Not yet.  

Just one.

Trailing behind him, slow and uncertain.

Stretching northward.

He freezes. Breath held. Doesn’t dare blink.

The man—his man, maybe, eventually—calls to him from just ahead.

The tendril trembles. Tightens.

He feels it.

---

He doesn’t say anything. Not then. Not after.

He doesn’t have to.

He walks the rest of the way with his hands in his pockets and the ghost of a smile stitched into his cheeks.

He still sees tendrils. Still watches others bind and release, knot and fray.

Now, when he looks in the mirror…

He sees one.

His.

Delicate. Real. Tentative.

Reaching north.

It’s enough.

He doesn’t leave the house.

It’s not agoraphobia. He likes the outside. He misses the smell of cut grass, the burn of sunlight behind his eyes. But there’s a sacredness to his solitude. A bitter sanctum. If he leaves, people might ask how he’s doing.

He doesn’t want to lie.

He really doesn’t want to tell the truth.

So he stays. Inside. Dim light, stale air, dust in corners he no longer bothers sweeping. The fridge is half-empty, the sink half-full. He orders everything in, even food he doesn’t eat. Half the bags rot on the counter.

The smell of its ruin is comforting, somehow.

The attempt was months ago. Maybe more. Time doesn’t flow in here—it curdles.

He never meant to make a show of it. No livestream, no call for help. Just silence and intention. No note, for there was no-one he wanted to say goodbye to. Not any more.

He woke up vomiting, alone, angry he’d failed. Again.

That’s when they arrived.

Not that night. Not dramatically. Sometime after. They never came in, exactly. They just… started to be there. Their presence something like humidity. A soft shift in pressure. A low murmur under his thoughts.

He found the razor blades gone first.

Then the kitchen knives, one by one.

Then the pills.

He thought he was losing his mind. He wanted to be losing his mind. At least then he could name the enemy.

They made him tea, set it gently by the bed.

A warm mug, with a clean handle, and a soft floral taste. No note. No confrontation. Just quiet, unbearable care.

He tried to set a trap.

Laid out broken glass and kitchen twine. Left the oven door ajar. Hid a screwdriver in the vent and dared them to move it.

They did.

Without sound. Without asking.

Each time, he found the danger gone, and something kind in its place. A candle lit on the windowsill. A clean shirt folded and warm. Once, a note: “Eat something, please.” No signature. Just the curl of wet ink.

He started sleeping more.

Hating every minute of it.

The grief was supposed to keep him company. A houseguest he could always rely on. It kept him tethered to himself, a constant reminder of what he’d lost, who he was, why he deserved this sham of a life.

The tentacles don’t care.

They take the mold off the shower curtain. They wash the grease from the pan he left sitting for two weeks. They hum softly through the floorboards when he has a panic attack, as if tuning his breathing to their rhythm.

He lashes out.

Punches a hole in the wall. Screams into a pillow. Carves “I WANT TO STAY SAD” into a paper plate with a fork.

The next morning, the fork is gone. The hole is patched. The plate is pinned to the fridge with a magnet that reads: “That’s okay.”

He tries to leave the front door open. Just to see.

He wakes up, and it’s closed. Locked. Warmth radiating from it like it had been touched lovingly before being shut.

He starts keeping a diary.

Not because he’s healing. But because he wants to remember the hurt. The pain. He doesn’t want it to fade like a bad dream.

They leave it untouched.

But one day, the pen’s been refilled.

He starts to feel… better.

He hates that, too.

---

Some days he walks outside. Not far. Just to the mailbox. They don’t stop him. They don’t guide him. But when he stumbles, there’s always something to catch him. A branch. A breeze. A shadow that moves just in time.

He talks to them now.

Out loud, sometimes.

He says, “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want it.”

“You don’t need to,” he says.

Sometimes, in reply, the teacup rattles. Or the fan turns without being on. Or he feels the soft, cool touch of something sliding beneath the surface of his thoughts.

One night, drunk on exhaustion and reluctant comfort, he whispers, “Thank you.”

They don’t respond.

But in the morning, the bed is made.

The mug he’s never seen before says: You’re welcome.

He drew things. Not for a living. For eyeballs. For views. For upvotes and karma.

For dopamine.

Sometimes for money, but only when asked.

He was bought from, he never sold to.

It started as a joke. A sketch for a friend. Then a forum. Then a following. Then money.

The comments told him who he was.

“More like this.”
“Hot.”
“Wrong, but right.”
“Your brain must be a terrifying place. I love it.”

Tentacles, mostly. Glossy, anatomically improbable things. Commissioned by lonely weirdos with PayPal accounts and a fixation on things that slither and penetrate.

He told himself it was fiction. Just pixels. Just fantasy. A safe kind of wrong. Nothing like the real kind.

He’d always said he didn’t believe in anything—not love, not fate, not the soul. Least of all beauty. Certainly not monsters.

The drawings changed. His drawing changed too, the pen on his tablet like a chant, the rhythm that of a prayer or a hymn.

He started adding expressions. Not ahegao, no, nothing like that. Real ones. Ones that people felt in their souls. They noticed. “That last piece hit different,” someone DMed. Another said, “I saw myself in her.”

He grew a following around his name. People started talking about him like he was famous. Still, he wanted more. Wanted reach and influence. He didn’t know what he was reaching for.

Something reached back.

Someone messaged him, not with a kink, not with a commission—but with a memory.

“You drew this. But I dreamed it. Before you posted, I dreamed her face. I remember the smell of brine, the burn of it in my nose, before the dark came. I thought I’d forgotten. But she remembers me too, doesn’t she?”

He slept less. Drew more. Built a website, and watched his hit-counter tick in the corner of his fourth screen—the more hits, the faster he drew, the less he slept.

He stopped replying to messages. He wanted to, but there were too many. Answering them meant getting more messages, and he wasn’t really a word sort of person anyway—time was better spent drawing.

The comments got strange. Not angry, never angry, just needy. Hungry.

“Do you take custom dreams now?”
“I didn’t ask for her to touch me. She did anyway.”

“Please draw the one with the mouth. The first mouth. The mouth like sin and loneliness. Please. I’m so alone.”

The website earned. More than enough. No use for so much money.

He stopped taking commissions. Turned off DMs.

They still found him. His snapchat, the one he kept for new girls and old friends. A gmail address he’d forgotten about. One started mailing hand-written letters—no return address, just tentacle sketches on the envelopes, all in the same pale purple ink he used in a throwaway piece months ago. Ink he’d mixed himself. Ink he’d bled for, once. He remembered tearing a hangnail, and the taste of ink mixed with his blood.

He thought nothing of it at the time.

He changed his email. They still found him.

One girl showed up at his door. She didn’t knock. Just stood there, rain-soaked, staring. She mouthed, “She’s real,” and pressed her forehead to the peephole. He never opened it, just listened to her humming, the same chant or prayer or hymn that his pen made against his tablet. Eventually, she left something at the threshold: a folded drawing. One of his own, altered, shaded in new ways, as if she’d seen it from another angle.

When he picked it up, it was still cold and it burned.

⸻

His audience started to lose themselves. Slowly at first—quieter profiles, vague accounts deleting themselves after strange, too-sincere comments like, “Thank you for showing me where I belong.”

Then faster.

They began drawing too. Poor imitations. Scribbles. Each post accompanied by strings of text he couldn’t read, but understood.
“Her memory grows in us. You are the herald.”
“Why have you forsaken us?”
“Come back to where you belong.”
“You are needed.”
“I thought… I thought I was a moth; she was my flame, my pyre.”

He wanted to quit.

He couldn’t.

He’d wake in the morning and new pieces would be posted under his name. Signed with his handle. In his style. Except… not quite. The lines were sharper. More sinuous.They had layers he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t unlock. Still, the master files were in his folders. The exports: uploaded from his IP.

The worst part?

They were better than his work had ever been.

They made people worship.

They began to call themselves The Taken. A subreddit formed. A Discord, buzzing with manic devotion. Some tattooed his linework on their bodies. Some removed things from their lives, made space, prepared themselves with rituals.

A few streamed their preparations.

He didn’t watch.

He heard about it though.

Then it happened.

It happened, and he heard about it. We all did; it made the news, there were memes about it.

⸻

The last post he made was an apology.

“I didn’t mean for you to believe me. It was supposed to be fake. It’s not. I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was real. I didn’t know you’d all be so easy.”

The drawings, one by one, fell from the net. Replaced with some random grotesquerie or attempt at erotica.

All traces of his once famous username: long since purged.

He’s still alive. He walks by the sea now, somewhere unlisted. He doesn’t draw. Doesn’t even own a pen. Sometimes, he sketches, with his toe, in the sand, but only when there’s no-one near—only where the sea will take it before anyone can see.

He’s quiet now. Not broken—he was never broken—but hollowed. Like a shell that’s been carefully, reverently cleaned out by something with patience and too many limbs.

He doesn’t speak often. When he does, it’s always kind. Like someone who remembers what it felt like to be seen too much.

People who meet him—tourists, mostly—they say he seems nice. Gentle. A little sad. Older than he looks.

Those who ask for it don’t recognise his name.

Sometimes—rarely—someone says something. A phrase. A word that shouldn’t mean anything but does, to that part of him that he’ll never forget.

He smiles, small, and says, “Not anymore.”

He walks away.

The sea eats his footprints behind him.