Memories of Ink and Loss

I wrote that on the kitchen counter. In ketchup first, because I was still pretending to be FINE. Then in something thicker, something that might have been mustard or maybe toothpaste once because I had run out of FINE.

You think you live in a box, don’t you? Four walls. One door. Two windows. Containment. Lies.

You live in your flesh armoured bone-mech that your electro-pudding-self pilots and you don’t EVEN KNOW IT.

Sweet summer child.

I can see them now. The way the corners pulse if you look long enough. They’ve been watching forever. Tentacles, not always visible—just impressions at first, bruises on the paint where no one touched. Now they’re bold. Curling up through the cracks in the linoleum. Tapping at the glass like polite little fingers that bend in places fingers don’t.

They talk.

Oh, do they talk.

It’s FINE.

They don’t use words, not really, but you hear it. Like wet whispering inside your teeth. Like a song that hates being sung and fights to be unremembered.

They keep telling me, “YOU WERE EMPTY TOO LONG.”

I laughed. Too loud. Scared the neighbors. Emptiness is FINE. Emptiness was comfortable. They keep saying it, keep insisting. Like they’re writing it into me.

Sucks for them. I’m too full already. No room for words. Full. To the brim. Spilling over at times, onto the floor to sploosh and gurgle and evaporate.

I’m FINE.

---

The mirror was the first to go. Too honest; it knew too much and it kept telling me things. I smashed it with the chair leg I found on the roof. Didn’t stop the reflection, though. Didn’t stop it from watching back. There are tentacles there now too. Writhing behind the cracks like veins in glass. They blink sometimes. They blink at me.

With no eyes. Still.

They’re FINE.

I scratched my answers into the walls. Every surface. Fork, fingernail, teeth when it came to it.

“I’M NOT AFRAID.”

“I DIDN’T INVITE YOU.”

“I DON’T BELONG TO ANYONE.”

The walls replied.

Different handwriting, worse grammar:

“YOU DO. YOU ALWAYS WERE. YOU BELONGED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.”

I think that was meant to be comforting.

It’s FINE.

WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY ELBOWS?

---

I tried leaving. Opened the door. But the hallway wasn’t the hallway anymore. It was softer. Breathing. I stepped in and the carpet stuck. Not glue—flesh. Flesh that moved, slow and patient, like it had been waiting for me to stop pretending.

I didn’t know if I had any pretence left in me.

It gripped and clung.

FINE then.

I closed the door again. Slammed it. It laughed. Not the door—the thing behind it.

ineedmorewristsmywristshavebeenreplacedbyanklesandidontlikeitnossireeidon’tlikeitonelittlebitidont.

Now I’m here. Writing this on the floor. My knees ache, but that’s FINE. FINE is over. FINE was always a lie. ineedmorewristsmywrists

have

been

replaced

byanklesandidontlikeitnossiree

idon’tlikeitonelittlebitidont. FINE was the untruth that people wanted to hear me say. To mean. To feel.

I was people once.

They’re closer tonight. I can feel them sliding up my arms as I scratch these letters in, guiding my hand when it shakes too much. Sometimes I let them. It’s easier that way.

They smell like salt and old wood and something sweeter, something like forgiveness and ruin and the way old vinyl tastes when you lick the record as it spins.

I think they love me.

FINE then.

Their problem. Not mine.

---

One just pressed its tip against my lips. Cold. Patient. Waiting.

I think it wants me to stop writing.

I think it wants me to say “yes.”

You know what? FINE. I might.

I just might.

Because doors don’t close. They breathe.

They’ve been holding their breath for me.

When they exhale, I’m gone.

FINE.

She called it hunger, but that was a charity, a mercy. A simplification. What she meant was need, but deeper—need without an object. Thirst without water, desire without the hope of touch.

It started young. She remembered sitting in the pantry at six years old, chewing the corners of cardboard boxes. Her mother scolded her for it, but the cereal inside never mattered. The box had shape. Texture. A dryness and a roundness that she needed to understand with her teeth.

The hunger never went away.

She tried other things as she got older. Salt, licked off her skin, from the inside of her elbow. Clay, once. A spoonful stolen from an unguent meant for some mystical youtube solution to imagined problems.

She ate, of course, but that was never what she really wanted.

She dated men, and sometimes women, and once someone who was both and neither. They all tasted like new dust or ancient hope. Not bad. Just not it.

The hunger remained. Vague. Lingering.

Unsatisfied.

Insatiable.

She went to therapists. They didn’t know what she meant when she said she was starving in a house full of food.

She didn’t tell them about the dreams.

A presence visited her sometimes in the between hours of sleep. Its body shimmered, boneless and undefined, more suggestion than flesh. Its voice came from beneath her building. It offered no comfort. Only presence.

“Still hungry?” it asked once.

She nodded in the dream.

“Good,” it said.

---

Over time, she realized she was meant to be hollow. That the hunger wasn’t a flaw—it was a keyhole. It was the shape of something waiting.

Waiting to be filled.

Her hunger was the shape of what she would become.

Her hunger was her existence, her existence was to be her absence.

She began to write it down. Little entries in a black notebook: descriptions of what the hunger felt like. Never what it wanted, because it never wanted—it simply was.

People started finding her writing. First online, then in print. They wrote her letters. Emails. Sent her boxes filled with strange things: stones shaped like tongues, pencils too short to be written with, candy wrappers that had been scrubbed clean and sterile.

They said things like: “I know this hunger. I thought I was the only one.”

She never responded. She couldn’t. They were trying to name something unnameable.

She knew better.

Absence has no name of its own.

It is named only for what it is not.

---

One day, she stopped eating. Just to see.

And the hunger… shifted.

Not faded. Not sated. Never sated.

It changed flavour.

She understood, then, what it had been waiting for. Not food. Not love. Not meaning.

It wanted devotion.

Not to her. Not for her. Not of her.

From her.

To it.

So, she offered herself. Not in death—but in voice, in story, in acts of meticulous subtraction.

Each day, she removed one thing from her life. A mirror broken. A shirt shredded. A memory forgotten.

She documented it all.

And when she disappeared entirely, there was no funeral. No-one left in the absence of her life to memorialise her.

Only her words remained, scattered fragments, left behind like fingerprints on fogged glass.

Across the world, others began to feel it.

The hunger.

One by one, they came to realised that they’d always known its taste.

Perhaps. Now, you do too.

Do you?

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 knows 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.