Memories of Ink and Loss

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.

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.