Welcome to Ink & Bone
In the previous column, Found in the Margins, I told you about the first boy I ever wrote.
Before I knew what I was doing. Before I even knew it was love.
This is what Ink & Bone is for. To return. To reveal. To remember how these stories first spoke, not in brilliance, but in brokenness.
This one is about silence. And what it teaches.
Christian didn’t talk much in those early drafts.
And neither did I.
The writing I did back then wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t bold or self-aware.
It didn’t shimmer with metaphor or wit.
It was shy. Clipped. Full of pauses.
I wrote the way I lived, cautiously, and in code.
Because everything else was too loud.
Mass.
The belt.
The fridge door slamming after school.
The sound of my name shouted down the hallway, not with rage but with that tight, warning tone. The one that meant something was wrong, and it was probably me.
So when I wrote, I didn’t fill pages with dialogue or plot or flourish.
I filled them with what wasn’t being said.
I found one story in my vault.
Christian stood at the end of a long path.
That was it.
He didn’t walk. He didn’t knock. He didn’t speak.
He just stood there, watching a screen door sway in the breeze, too afraid to step forward, too hurt to turn back.
And I remember thinking:
This is the whole story.
That moment.
That ache.
That stillness.
I didn’t realise, at the time, that I was trying to write what it meant to be powerless.
To be stuck between danger and longing.
Between not wanting to go back. And not knowing where else to go.
Christian was my language for that.
Still is.
He understood silence, not the poetic kind, but the kind you learn early.
The kind that teaches your breath to stay shallow.
The kind that makes your bones smart.
The kind that keeps your voice small and your needs even smaller.
He didn’t speak because I couldn’t.
But his silences held shape.
Held bruises.
Held prayers I didn’t believe in anymore.
There’s a line I found years later in an old spiral-bound draft:
He counted the seconds between creaks in the hallway, the way some boys count down to Christmas.
That line stopped me when I read it again as an adult.
Because I remembered writing it.
And I remembered what it felt like.
That tension. That waiting.
The way time bends when you’re afraid, and pretending not to be.
I didn’t write Christian to be brave.
I wrote him because I needed someone to listen.
Even if he wasn’t real.
Even if he was just another quiet boy in the margins of a schoolbook.
And somehow, that was enough.
Because in those silences between sentences,
he heard me.
He always did.
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