Welcome to Ink & Bone
In the last column, The Silence Between Sentences, I told you how Christian became my language for what could not be spoken.
How silence, not plot, was what held the truth.
This is what Ink & Bone is for. To return. To listen again.
To open the archive, not for nostalgia, but for reckoning.
This one is about the drafts that waited. And the boy who didn’t forget.
I didn’t go looking for him.
Not exactly.
It started, as these things often do, with a search for something else, a sexy photo, a tax file, a half-finished short story I thought I might rework. I opened an old hard drive with low expectations. Just clutter. The ghosts of operating systems past.
But then I saw it.
A folder marked DO NOT OPEN.
Which, of course, meant: open immediately and prepare to ache.
Inside were dozens of files with names I barely remembered creating.
boy1_final.doc
me-not-me.txt
Tambor_tryagain.docx
And when I opened them, the clunky formatting, the triple spaces after every full stop, the page breaks in all the wrong places… There he was.
Christian.
Still thirteen.
Still waiting.
Still standing at the end of that long path.
Still hiding under a doona in a hot house on a Sunday afternoon.
Still gripping the edge of a pew with both hands like he might float away if he let go.
The sentences were jagged. The rhythm uneven. But the feeling… The feeling was intact.
I scrolled through scenes I had long since forgotten. One where he sat alone in the library, tracing the spine of a book with a bitten fingernail. Another where he dropped a dinner plate and flinched before the sound had even finished ringing out.
They weren’t good stories, not by any technical standard.
But they were honest.
Too honest, maybe.
They hurt to read.
And yet, I couldn’t look away.
I realised, somewhere between rereading and weeping, that I hadn’t buried Christian. I’d entombed him. Preserved him like a relic of a self I wasn’t ready to face.
But he didn’t rot in that silence.
He waited.
He waited for me to be old enough, brave enough, quiet enough to hear him fully.
And when I was, when I finally opened those files and met that boy again, face to face, I didn’t feel guilt. Or shame. Or pity.
I felt recognition.
And then I felt resolve.
He didn’t need rewriting.
He needed remembering.
Not polished. Not modernised. Not rescued.
Just… Finished.
So I printed the stories. All of them.
Stacked them in a pile and stared at it for days.
And then, slowly, I began again.
I began writing 1973 not to fix him, but to give him what he never got:
a complete sentence.
a full arc.
a place to live, not just survive.
I didn’t save him.
I just let him out.
And the archive, that dusty, half-labelled place full of flinching paragraphs and long silences, it didn’t hold resentment.
It held grace.
Because Christian never needed me to be better than I was.
He just needed me to come back.
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