Chapter 3

Ink-Stained Sin
—Nathan

I don’t fall in love.
I collect ghosts.
Trace them onto paper.
Name them in metaphors so I don’t have to admit they were real.

She was supposed to be another one.
A distraction.
A body.
A release.
Something I could write about and forget.
A temporary flame to warm my hands,
not burn down the house I barely survived in.

But she walked into my ruin
like she’d been there before.
Like the cracks in my chest fit the shape of her mouth.
Like the chaos in her bones could dance with mine and call it music.

I didn’t ask for her name.
Because names mean memory.
And memory is where the rot begins.

She moaned like a hymn.
Bit like a warning.
Looked at me like she already knew how I’d end,
and still climbed into the fire anyway.

We weren’t soft.
We weren’t kind.
We were sin wrapped in skin
and stitched together with spit and spite.

She fucked like she was trying to forget someone.
I kissed her like I wanted to erase myself.

We weren’t in love.
We were in ruin.
And we liked it that way.

I should’ve burned her out of me.
Cut her name from every page.
Let her memory bleed and fade like all the others.

But she stayed.

Not in the room.
Not in the bed.
In the in-between.

In the pause before I lit another cigarette.
In the static between heartbeats.
In the spaces between my words.

She turned lust into language.
Pain into punctuation.
Guilt into poetry, I couldn’t stop writing.

She’s the poem I should’ve burned.
But I inked her into my skin instead.

She is every stanza I never meant to keep.
A sin I didn’t confess, but wore.
A fever I didn’t fight, because maybe I liked the way it burned.

She says she wants something healthier.
Softer.
Cleaner.
But I know her ribs still remember my name.

And I know I’ll be the one who pushes her off the cliff,
and then writes about how she fell.

Because I don’t love her.
Not the way people are supposed to love.
Not the way people survive.

I love her like a sinner clings to the edge of his grave.
Like a poet addicted to pain.
Like a dying man trying to taste every poison before his lungs give out again.

This isn’t redemption.
This isn’t healing.
This is Ink-Stained Sin.

And I’d rather go to hell,
with her teeth on my throat
than die clean
without a single page left to burn.