Ink in My Veins

The first time the words appeared on paper, I thought it was luck. A fluke. A fleeting gift the universe had decided to give me, just to see if I’d notice. But by the third page, I realized something else: the words didn’t come to me—they came through me.

I had been writing for years, chasing ghosts of stories I could never catch. Characters sputtered and vanished, plots collapsed like cheap scaffolding, and every morning I woke with the heavy ache of failure. Then, that night, ink began to bleed from my pen with a ferocity I had never felt before.

It started small. A story about a man who sold secrets to strangers, a woman who remembered things she shouldn’t, a city that never slept but always watched. The words were vivid, precise, painful. I wrote until my fingers cramped, until the paper was soaked with sweat and ink. When I finally looked up, the room had changed. Shadows were sharper, the air thicker, and my reflection in the window seemed… wrong.

I told no one. Writers don’t tell anyone when the work comes too easily. They fear the jealousy, the disbelief, the casual dismissal of something sacred. Instead, I wrote. Every night. Every moment I could steal from life. Sleep became optional. Food became optional. I drank only coffee and the faint sense of urgency that these words might vanish if I blinked.

And then I noticed the first sign. The stories weren’t staying on paper. They were leaking into the world.

I walked to the corner store and saw him—the man from my last story, standing in the aisle as if he had always existed there. He didn’t see me, but I saw him. Every detail matched my description: the coat, the nervous twitch in his right hand, the scar I had imagined as a flourish to deepen his character.

I blinked. He disappeared.

At first, I thought I was imagining it. Sleep deprivation will do that to a person. But it happened again. And again. Characters I had sketched in paragraphs, sometimes half-formed and abandoned, started appearing in cafes, on buses, walking past my apartment like ghosts who had found a body to inhabit.

The stories were alive. And they were reading me back.

I tried to stop. I tore pages from my notebook, burned manuscripts in the sink, and begged the words to leave me alone. But every night, when the house was quiet, the pen called. I couldn’t resist. I sat, trembling, and let the ink spill, letting the characters live or die according to their whims—or mine.

Soon, the boundaries blurred. My apartment wasn’t my apartment anymore; it was a stage. The characters watched, whispered, laughed at mistakes I didn’t intend to write. Friends noticed my obsession, the hollow look in my eyes, the frantic scrawl of words at 3 a.m., but they didn’t understand. Who would understand? Not even I fully understood.

One evening, I wrote a character I feared. Someone cruel, clever, and ruthless. I wanted to see if I had the power to control him. But the moment I wrote his first line, I felt it: a tug, a pull so strong it stole my breath. When I looked up, he was standing in the corner of my apartment. Smiling. Waiting.

“You shouldn’t have written me,” he said.

I dropped the pen. It clattered to the floor. Ink pooled around it like a warning. I wanted to run, but the door wouldn’t open. I wanted to scream, but the room swallowed my voice. The character moved toward me, confident, real. He was mine, and yet, he wasn’t.

That night, I understood something essential. Writing isn’t just telling a story. It’s bargaining. It’s a deal you make with forces you cannot name, with a world you can barely perceive. Ink is more than pigment. Words are more than sound. And writers—they are not masters of the story. They are vessels.

I didn’t sleep for three nights. I didn’t eat. I didn’t leave the apartment. I wrote constantly, trying to undo what I had created, trying to reclaim control. But every line I wrote seemed to strengthen the character instead of weakening him.

By the fourth night, I stopped. I stared at the blank page, trembling, and realized that sometimes creation is permanent. You don’t get to say goodbye.

The room was silent, almost peaceful. I thought the nightmare was over.

Then I heard the softest whisper behind me:

“Tell my story next.”

I swallowed. And I picked up the pen.

Because writers always do.