Becoming the Boy Who Wrote Him

Part IV: The Boy I Wrote Before I Became Him

Welcome to Ink & Bone

In the last column, The Archive Doesn’t Forget, I told you how Christian waited.
Not as a memory, but as a presence. Unfinished. Unspoken. Alive in the silences.

This is what Ink & Bone is for. To honour the stories that weren’t abandoned, only paused.
To trace the slow, steady arc from survival to authorship.

This one is about becoming the kind of boy who could write him back.

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I didn’t know I was becoming him.
The boy who wrote Christian.
Not at thirteen.
Not when I was scribbling poems between bruises.
Not when I was learning how to press ‘save’ like it was an act of prayer.
Not when I scrawled confessions in margins I hoped no one would read.

But now, all these years later, I can see the slow, strange alchemy.
How every silent page taught me how to hold grief without naming it.
How every half-finished story trained my hands to steady a trembling voice.
How every time I wrote Christian into the dark, I was also writing a way out...
not just for him…
but for me.

We’ve both grown, Christian and I.
He stayed thirteen in 1973, but not in my mind.
There are versions of him older, searching, changed.
Versions that linger on train platforms. That sit on rooftops in silence.
That ache with a man’s body and a boy’s memories.
Versions that I’ve glimpsed in poems and scenes I wasn’t ready to finish.
Versions that will find their way to the page.
He didn’t stop. He didn’t vanish. He deepened.

He grew beside me.
Through the years I tried to unlearn softness.
Through the seasons I swallowed my voice just to be palatable.
Through jobs and cities and names I chose like armour.
He kept watching. Waiting.
Becoming more real with each year I stayed alive.

And I carry him still.
In the way I write boys who listen more than they speak.
In the way I linger on breath.
On silence.
On skin that remembers too much.
On rooms where nothing happens… But everything is felt.

Christian shaped my syntax.
He shaped my pauses.
He shaped the ache I let live in sentences.
He shaped the core of the author I would become, not by shouting, but by staying.
He was never loud.
But he was impossible to leave behind.

So when I finally sat down to write 1973, it wasn’t a new book.
It was a return.
A circle closing.
Not polished. Not clean.
But whole.

I gave him a name.
A year.
A mother.
A river.
A truth.
A voice.
And I gave him what he had never been allowed:
time.
to unfurl.
to speak.
to survive on the page without being erased.

And in doing so, I gave myself something too:
permission.
To be seen.
To be soft.
To be angry.
To be full of contradictions and still worthy of the telling.
To be still standing.

These days, I write under many names.
Rowan Thornwell. R. J. Thornwell. Barney Farnham. Marlo Sin. Plain Smut.
Each one a facet. A voice. A body made of language.
Each one born from the same truth:
I survived the story I couldn’t write as a child.
And now, I write it fully.
With heat. With humour. With horror. With hunger.
And still, always, with him.

Christian wasn’t just a character.
He was the first time I told the truth.
He was my first story. My first mirror. My first mercy.

And I’ll never stop thanking him for waiting.
Not just for me to become a writer…
But to become the boy who could love him back.