The Dying Fall

Chapter 1: Addict

Jul 07, 2024

‘That strain again! it had a dying fall’

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

Song for this chapter:

Chapter One: Addict

Carrie pulled on her jacket, yanked a wool hat over her unbrushed hair and then lifted the mattress to retrieve a green, cloth bag. Through the flimsy fabric, she patted the contents ruefully and then balled the bag into her pocket. It wasn’t much but hopefully it would get her a bud. She sat on the edge of the mattress whilst she laced up her boots and tried to remember where she’d last put her gloves. Her gaze slid away from the empty neighbouring bed as she got to her feet, opened the curtains and then tripped over a pile of dirty clothes to get to the door. She was making far too much noise for 7 a.m. on a Saturday; the last thing she wanted to do was wake her mother.

The staircase creaked treacherously as she tiptoed down into the dim grey of the hall. Taking three long strides to the front door, Carrie let herself out onto the street and closed the door behind her with an exhale of relief. The cold air instantly nipped at her fingers and cheeks, and she was almost tempted to go back indoors and look for her gloves, but she didn’t want to waste any more time. Nano would only hang around for an hour, and she needed to make sure she was first in line for the new bud he’d been promising for months now.

Pulling her scarf over her nose and hunching her shoulders against the brisk wind that scattered dry leaves and dust along the pavement in front of her, Carrie began a quick stride toward the market. A half-dead snake of guilt writhed in her stomach. The only thing keeping it alive was how her mother would react if she discovered Carrie’s habit. She’d be furious. And afraid. And heartbroken… But mostly furious. The fact that her habit was illegal, dangerous, and morally wrong, no longer bothered Carrie. It was hardly surprising that she had gone the way of her father, her sister and her grandmother. It was in her blood. She was resigned to it. But she didn’t want to hurt her mother and so she felt guilty that every time she snuck out to get a hit she took a step closer to doing just that.

The cobnut tree stood like an amber flame in the square as Carrie crossed the cobbles, the nuts snapping and cracking as she crushed them with relish beneath her boots. She darted down a grimy alleyway between the theatre and the health centre, and at the sound of a car turning in behind her, stepped into a boarded doorway until it had passed—relieved that it was just a civilian vehicle and not a Patrol car. Then, trying not to breath in too deeply the stench of urine and alcohol, she continued down the alley until it spat her out into the market.

The stall holders were only just setting up: dragging out tables, unloading vans and pulling open awnings and marquee flaps. There were a few punters around too, poking into boxes and rifling through rails in the hope of catching an early bargain. Carrie slowed her pace a little, so as not to look too obviously purposeful, and meandered her way through the stalls to the railway bridge. After a casual glance around her, she slipped behind the oatmeal van, gagging a little at the cloying smell, and saw Nano leaning casually against the bridge, just inside an arch. His dark eyes crinkled at the edges in a cocky smirk as he noticed her and Carrie resisted the urge to turn on her heel and walk away. He had better not push her buttons today, or she’d be biting through her tongue to keep her temper. She desperately needed a fix, but she couldn’t let Nano see that or, like the unscrupulous dealer he was, he’d hike the price up in a heartbeat.

“A bit early for you on a weekend, isn’t it?” Nano said with a provocative wiggle of his eyebrows. “I only saw you a few weeks ago—used up your last supply already?”

“Just thought I’d see if you’ve actually got that new stuff you’ve been bragging about for months,” Carrie replied with a shrug.

Nano grinned. “Well, actually, I do.”

Carrie swallowed as Nano stepped forward and reached for his back pocket with one hand. He paused suddenly in the action and cocked his head to one side.

“What are you paying with?”

Here we go. Carrie pulled out the cloth bag and loosened the pull string. Taking out a bundle of notes, she handed them over. Nano started counting: ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-five, forty…

It wasn’t enough. Carrie knew it wasn’t—not for what she wanted. Nano looked at her expectantly and she was glad that he didn’t test her patience by stating the obvious.

“What exactly is this new stuff?” Carrie asked, as if the answer was ever going to change whether this deal happened or not.

Nano’s smile was smug. “It’s MIX.”

“MIX?”

Nano’s smile widened at the excited undertone Carrie failed to keep out of her voice. “A bit of TRANCE, some SYNTH, ROCK and elements of CLASSIC,” he said. “You’ll love it. This is stuff that was produced a mere hundred-and-sixty years ago.”

Carrie pulled her mouth down in a frown to try to calm her racing heart and mask her eagerness.

“Let’s see what else you’ve got then…” Nano said, holding out a hand for the bag.

Instead of handing him the bag, Carried dipped her hand into it again and then placed a microchip in Nano’s open palm. She watched him examine it for a moment and then put it in his jacket pocket.

“What else?”

“You’re joking,” Carrie said curtly. “That alone got me a ten track hit last month.”

Nano shrugged. “This is a fifteen track MIX, Carrie. A rare one. And you know how it is—inflation, rising quotas…”

“General greed,” Carrie added. “Screw you, Nano.” She held out her hand. “I’ll have my chip and my cash back then.”

Nano laughed, but made no move to return the items. “C’mon, Carrie. We’ve both been playing this game long enough to know that I know you’ve got something else in that bag—and that the way you’re going, you’ll soon be trading more than motherboard scraps for your hits.”

Carrie gave him a hard stare.

Nano’s forehead creased in a mild frown. “I guarantee this score will give you the biggest high you’ve ever had. It’ll keep even you going for six weeks—at least.”

Now who sounded desperate?

Nano obviously read her thought, as his eyes narrowed and he drew his height up a little. Carrie bet that Dryce was putting the pressure on his dealers to sell more hits, which the doubled Patrols were undoubtedly making even harder these days. She studied Nano for a second longer before putting her hand in the bag again. This MIX had better be worth it: what she was giving him was worth a third of next quarter’s utility bill.

Nano’s eye brightened and his expression became almost boyish with delight as he looked at the coil of copper in his hand. “How much?”

“Nearly half a metre.”

“Shit, Carrie! And you smuggled this out of the Recycling Plant?”

“I assume that’s adequate payment?’

Nano gave her a quick, impressed look and she was suddenly reminded that they’d once been schoolmates. He’d been in Savannah’s class, only a few years above her own. They’d all been so full of potential back then, and now look at them: one dealing, one stealing and the other dead.

Nano made a casual gesture and went to pocket the coil, but Carrie grabbed his sleeve.

“My MIX?”

Nano frowned at her, but reached into his back pocket with his free hand and pulled out a small pocket of paper that bugled with the shape of the button-shaped bud sealed inside it.

“Wait ‘til you get home, Carrie,” he warned.

“Sure,” Carrie replied. She let go of his sleeve and immediately shoved the paper square into her pocket, along with the cloth bag.

Nano grabbed her elbow. “I’m serious. This stuff is strong, it will…” He wavered.

He’s just as addicted as I am, Carrie thought. He probably only deals to pay for his own habit.

“All right.” She shrugged him off. “It’s not like I’m new to this, you know.”

“Yeah, well, Savannah wasn’t either.”

Carrie glared at the name. Why did people think it was necessary to threaten her with her sister’s history?

“Look,” Nano continued, “If you get caught it’s only one step away to my arse being on the line.”

“That kinda goes with the dealer territory,” Carrie said unsympathetically, as she backed out from under the bridge. “Along with robbing your customers blind,” she added wryly before turning and walking away.

As she marched through the market, Carrie realised she was shaking—and not from the cold. She hated that Nano was right. She was tempted to break open the paper wrapping and load her system with a buzz right then and there. The relief would be exquisite and she might just get away with it. But she wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t her sister. Or her father. She was still in control. Just about. As long as she paced herself. Last month had been bad. Mrs Windonn had put up the rent, work had put up her quota and it was Savannah’s birthday: she would have been twenty-three. Carrie couldn’t believe it was almost eighteen months since her sister had died. The pain and anger still ambushed her every now and then, and, when it did, she would take out a bud and hit up for an hour. Last week though, she’d overdone it and used up the entire charge of a bud in six days—just to get through the memories, her mother’s silence and the monotony of life. One little bud and she could be transported out of her weary existence, out of herself and out of the ache of the physical world.

This was exactly what she was going to do now. She couldn’t risk indulging in the house at this hour, so she detoured down the narrow alley at the side of the house and around to the back garden and the shed. No one bothered with the shed. It was full of junk that nobody had the time nor the inclination to deal with, so Carrie had made it her hideaway. She prised open the door with numb fingers and slipped inside, making sure to pull the door completely shut behind her. Climbing into the space she had made behind the old wooden furniture, bags of clothes, and gardening equipment, she grabbed a tatty quilt and settled onto a lumpy cushion with her back against the wall and the quilt pulled over her knees.

Carrie pulled towards her the small drawer, from the inside of a bureau, that was filled with used buds and a controller. Technically, she could exchange the dud buds for active ones, but she didn’t want to lose their individual content. One day she would find a charging device at the plant and smuggle it home, somehow, so that she could recharge the buds herself. Really, she ought to find a better hiding place for her gear; if her mother found it, she’d destroy the lot.

Carrie shook herself out of her thoughts. She couldn’t bear the silence any longer. She took out the paper pocket, ripped it open, synced the bud with the controller and then pressed the small black button into her right ear. She paused for just a second: this wasn’t a good idea. Once she started this hit, there was no knowing how much of this bud she would get through. She needed to make this one last. Just one track, she told herself. Just one to get her through the morning.

Carrie squeezed the controller and the bud activated. There was a heartbeat of white noise and then the first note played and seared straight to the core of her.

Carrie had seen enough State Health Care campaign videos to know the science of how this worked. Sound waves travelled from the bud to her eardrum, through to her cochlea, where they were converted from vibrations into electrical signals. These travelled along the nerve to the brain, where they triggered the release of dopamine and oxytocin, which, in turn, created the feeling of euphoria that was currently beginning to course through her body. It was a manufactured high: a chemical trigger that altered the state and function of her physiology; and it was why this stuff was classified as an illegal, mind-altering drug. Something that could turn a mood, with nothing more than a simple melody, was obviously dangerous.

But Carrie didn’t care. It didn’t feel like a series of neurological reactions to her. It felt like magic. Each beat, each melody, each harmony and intricate intertwining of sounds were like fingers thrumming on her veins, stirring her blood, zapping her heart and awakening her spirit, making her alive. For just a few snatched minutes of this sensation, she bartered her savings and stolen goods from work. Her hand began to tap against her leg under the quilt, her eyelids fluttered closed, and her annoyance with Nano rapidly dissipated. She couldn’t really blame him for exploiting her addiction; he had to make the risk of dealing worth it. If he was caught by the Patrol, he’d automatically face a penalty of sensorineural corrosion and at least a decade in prison. The prison sentence he could probably handle, but the sensorineural corrosion would mean the end of everything—of music, of highs, of a reason to get out of bed in the morning and face the dreary daily grind. Death would be a more merciful sentence. Nano knew that. Carrie knew that. Savannah had known it.

As the track ended, Carrie opened her eyes and checked her watch. Her mother would be up soon, with a list of chores that absolutely had to be accomplished this very weekend, and couldn’t possibly be put off until next Saturday, under any circumstances. Carrie squeezed the controller, removed the bud from her ear and put both in the bureau drawer. She eased herself stiffly off the cushion and rubbed the back of her legs. The cold had already bitten its way down to her joints, but she would rather have sat in it all day, getting high, than go back indoors. It wasn’t as if the house was going to be much warmer—about as warm as her mother’s attitude towards her.

Carrie could tell that her mother had reached a point of resigned disappointment with her since the nagging about applying for a degree scholarship had recently stopped. She was glad the nagging had ceased, but she wasn’t a fan of the cold disapproval that replaced it. She would weather it out though. What was the point of getting a degree just so she could spend her life in a lab doing a job she had no interest in, or sit in board meetings, analysing eco-data every day? She’d rather work at the Recycling Plant, dream about illegal highs in the evenings and spend what little spare cash she had on satisfying her addiction. Perhaps, someday, she would make her own highs.

Carrie snorted to herself as she closed the shed door behind her and crossed the yard to the house. The dozens of melodies she had swinging around her brain would never take a single breath of life. They’d remain unbirthed and soundless, haunting her with their phantom strains until she went mad with their caged reverberations. She didn’t have anywhere near enough equipment to produce highs, and, most likely, she would probably be in Savannah’s condition before she could even create a single track. Still, the idea gave her some sense of purpose when she lay awake in bed at night, working on the melodies that had visited her during the day. The songs had started coming years ago, but she hadn’t really paid them much attention until after Savannah’s scattering ceremony on the Ash Grounds. Now, aside from getting a fix, they were all she thought about. One day, she vainly told herself, if she lived long enough, she would make just one song into a track of her own.

Carrie let herself in through the back door and crept through the kitchen and into the hall. As she passed the living room, she saw her mother sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown, a mug of tea cupped in her hands. There was no way of sneaking past without being seen, so Carrie stopped on the threshold, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe.

“Morning,” she offered.

“You’re up early for a Saturday,” her mother said, rising from her seat. She stood facing Carrie, her face neutral but her shrewd gaze ready to pounce on a flicker of hesitation in Carrie’s response.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Carrie replied with a shrug. “I went for a walk around the block.”

Her mother’s expression slipped to reveal her scepticism, but she merely pulled her dressing gown closer about her and came towards the door. “I need the vegetable patch weeded today,” she said, as Carrie turned sideways to let her pass into the hall. “That plum root has got to come up so I can sow the turnip tops.”

“Yep,” Carrie responded.

Her mother paused in the kitchen doorway. “It should have been done weeks ago,” she added, “And if it’s not done this weekend it’ll be too late—we’re going to need that crop this winter.”

“I know,” Carrie said, trying not to roll her eyes as she pushed away from the living room doorway and turned towards the stairs. They’d had this conversation last night. “I’m going to wash…” She pulled off her hat and walked purposefully upstairs, feeling her mother’s suspicion following her with every step.

After running a bowl of warm water in the bathroom sink, washing, re-dressing and brushing her hair, Carrie slipped on her jacket, gathered the dirty clothes from her bedroom floor and carried them down to the kitchen. Her mother was making porridge on the stove and a mug of piping hot tea stood waiting for Carrie on the small wooden breakfast table. Carrie dumped her clothes in the laundry basket and then slumped onto a chair at the table and clasped the mug of tea close to her so that the steam warmed her chin as she sat with her legs outstretched in front of her.

“I’ll be at the laundrette this morning,” her mother said. “And then I’ve got to clean the wood burner.”

“Okay,” Carrie murmured.

“When you’ve finished the veg patch, you can write up the larder list.”

“Sure.”

For a minute there was only the sound of the spoon rhythmically scraping the bottom of the porridge pan. Carrie stared at the tabletop and tried to work out how long it would take to weed the vegetable patch and whether she’d have time for another track before her mother finished at the laundrette. The bigger question was could she keep it to just one track?

Probably not.

It was best to sneak the bud into the house when she was done in the garden and wait until Lights Out to hit up again. Carried sipped her tea and then glanced up to find her mother half-turned from the stove, the porridge pan in one hand and a keen look on her face. It took Carrie a second to realise her fingers had been tapping a beat on her mug—the beat of the track she’d listened to not twenty minutes ago in the shed. Ah, shit, she thought. Calmly, she curled her legs under her chair and leant forward to place her mug on the table.

“I’ll get the apple,” she said, getting to her feet and going to the fridge.

Think of something to say… think of something to say…

Carrie fetched the container of stewed apple from the fridge and sat back down at the table as her mother served up the porridge into two bowls. Even though her mother made no comment but silently stirred the stewed apple into her breakfast, Carrie felt the urge to cover up her slip with conversation. But no matter how her brain scrabbled for a topic, it came up blank. Instead, the two of them ate without speaking, and Carrie felt the lengthening silence concreting the disconnection between them.

When her mother had finished her porridge and headed upstairs to dress, Carrie downed her tea and pulled on the pair of wellies that stood by the back door. A gust of air ruffled her hair and fingered its way through her jacket as she crossed the garden to the shed. The spade and fork were hanging from a couple of rusty nails inside the door and Carrie hooked them out before grabbing a pair of holed gloves, a trowel and an old, dented bucket. She decided to tackle the plum root first; she hated to think how much frostier her mother would become if the turnip crop didn’t get sown this weekend.

Carrie located the stump of the plum tree poking up through the hard earth. She stuck the fork into the soil around it and pressed down on the tines with one foot until she felt them strike against something beneath the surface. Stepping back and leaving the fork sticking in the earth, Carrie fished in her pocket for a hairband, scooped her hair up into a ponytail and then stood with her hands on her hips, frowning at the stump. This was going to be a bigger job than she’d anticipated. A voice in the back of her mind told her plaintively that this wasn’t her job—that her father should be here to do this work. But another part of her, the part that snuck out at 7 a.m. and lied to her mother’s face, told her to get over it and on with it. If you’re tough enough to break the law, you’re tough enough to wrestle this root from its earthy grave.

Rubbing her hands together to warm them and flexing her fingers before putting on the gloves, Carrie yanked the fork from the ground and stabbed it back into the soil with new vigour. She worked for an hour, alternately loosening the earth and the tangle of woody roots with the fork and excavating the earth from around the stump with the spade. When she’d exposed enough of the tree’s tentacled network beneath the soil, she set to attacking the largest tendrils with the spade, slicing its edge into the wood, which split and twisted into fibrous strands that refused to be amputated from the stubby remains of the trunk. But Carrie kept hacking, and stamping on the roots, and swearing under her breath, until, despite the gloves, the pads of her palms began to blister.

When she had worked her way through the biggest roots, Carrie tossed the spade to one side, grabbed hold of the stump with both hands and began twisting it out of the earth. The trunk fought her for a few minutes until, with a savage wrench, she tore it from the ground, scattering soil into the air. Carrie dumped the stump on the ground and wiped her face with her sleeve. Her cheeks were flushed and her hands sore but, for a moment, a rush of exhilaration coursed through her and she laughed breathlessly. She glanced around her, as if to find someone with whom to share her triumph, and remembered with a jolt that she was completely alone. Her mother must have left for the laundrette a while ago; Carrie wasn’t sure if she just hadn’t heard her leave or if she hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. Faint clunks and murmurs came from the house next door as the Charltons prepared breakfast, and a dog barked in the street behind, but these sounds only emphasised the towering silence of her own home. An urge to run into the house and tell Savannah of her achievement came and went in a forgetful second.

A flutter of wings drew Carrie’s attention to a blackbird as it landed on the disturbed ground around the remaining tree roots that twisted up from the fresh crater in the vegetable patch. Carrie watched the bird tilt its head and then peck at the earth, plucking a worm from the warm, damp soil. Picking up the trowel, Carrie sank to her knees and began digging up the last of the plum tree roots. The blackbird hopped back a little and cocked its head to watch her warily with one eye. After a moment’s careful assessment, it went back to picking through the loosened earth, skipping around Carrie’s movements to collect up the bugs she unearthed.

Carrie had cleared most of the roots when her trowel struck something with a crumpling noise. Scraping aside the dirt, she prised out from the ground the twisted body of a plastic bottle. Any label had long been stripped from it, and though it was empty it still had its lid: a scratched and puckered token of the past. Plastic bottles had been banned for generations and being found in possession of any banned plastics carried a hefty fine. She should recycling it immediately in the designated bin down the street. Carrie stared at the bottle for a moment longer, wondering what it had once contained, and then, on a sudden impulse, she unscrewed the lid, scooped a handful of soil into it and replaced the cap. Holding the bottle close to her ear, she slowly tipped it one way and then another, letting her eyes close for a few seconds as the soft tumble of the earth hummed against her eardrum. Soon the earthy whisper was joined by another sound: a tentative, sporadic tapping on the leaves of the apple tree, which became an impatient pattering as drops of cold water splashed Carrie’s cheek, head and arms. For a magical moment, the two sounds seemed to meld together in rhythmic harmony. Swish, patter. Swish, patter, patter. Swish, patter. Swish, patter, patter…

And then there came a sudden downpour of rain.

Opening her eyes, Carrie jumped to her feet, grabbed the bucket and tools, and stumbled to the shed. She dumped the spade, fork and bucket inside the door, threw the plastic bottle and her gloves on the window ledge and, slamming the door shut behind her, made a dash for the house. Halfway across the lawn, she suddenly turned and ran back to the shed. Slipping inside, she scrambled over the old furniture, bags and boxes into her secret nook and grabbed the controller and MIX bud from the bureau drawer before squeezing back out into the downpour to the kitchen door.

Standing just inside the kitchen, Carrie watched the rain hammer the pots of herbs and plants, and the scrubby lawn and vegetable beds into submission. Behind her, she heard the front door close and her mother struggle into the hall with the laundry bags. She’d been in the garden much longer than she’d thought. Time had slipped so easily away; she was almost tempted to run back out into the rain and get to pulling up the weeds, rather than face what would promise to be a long, silent afternoon indoors.

Sliding the controller and bud into the pocket of her jeans, Carrie closed the back door and then took off her wellies and jacket. She walked to the kitchen and began washing her hands as her mother came in from the hall, unbuttoning her coat and shaking it out on the tiles. Her mother hung her coat on the back of a chair and then pushed her damp fringe from her forehead and tugged down her jumper.

“That was lucky,” she said. “I was only a few doors away when it started.” She crossed the kitchen, her gaze wandering from Carrie’s dirty wellies to the back window, where the rain streaked the view through the pane. “I guess I won’t be planting the turnips today.”

“I took out the plum tree root,” Carrie said, drying her hands on her jeans as she slipped towards the hall. “I’ll take the laundry upstairs.”

“You’re going to clear up that mess out there, aren’t you?” her mother asked, referring to the stump and roots piled on the lawn.

Carrie tapped her fingers restlessly against her thigh as she paused to stare at her mother’s back. “Want me to do it now?”

“I’m sure the rain will ease off in an hour or two.”

Carrie didn’t make a reply but stepped into the hall and swept up the laundry bags. She thudded up the stairs and set about shoving clean clothes into drawers and cupboards, as if they might try to resist her efforts and spring out again. When she had finished, she folded up the bags and stood on the landing for a moment, with her fingers clasping the bud in her pocket, listening to the sounds from the kitchen.

Not now, she told herself. Not until curfew; not until everyone’s in bed and you’re lying in the dark on your own—then it will just be you and the music. But not too much of it. You have to make this one last. You are not Savannah or your father. You’re not that bad yet. You’re not.

The sound of a teaspoon clinking in a mug travelled from the kitchen and unsettled Carrie out of her thoughts. As if in reply to the small but piercing noise, Carrie found herself whispering “I’m not that bad…” before she slid her hand from her pocket and went down to the kitchen.

Chapter 2: Inspection

Thank you for reading The Dying Fall. This work is public so feel free to share it.

Next weekend: Chapter 2—Inspection

I’ve created an Index Page for The Dying Fall on the Substack webpage for Life at 23.5 Degrees (the novel has its own section). I’ve linked that post here. I’ll be updating it each time I publish a chapter so that all the links to each published chapter can be found in one place: The Dying Fall Index Page

Author’s notes:

The idea for this story came to me after I’d taken a break from my teaching career to work on another novel (the third and final installment in my young adult Divinity Laws trilogy)—which is pretty typical: story ideas popping up right when you’re supposed to be working on something else. I’ve always been obsessed with music, having grown up in a home where music was always playing in one form or another, all day, every day.

That hasn’t changed now I’m an adult and live on my own. The first thing I do in the morning or when I get back to my flat, is put on music. I listen to it in the car, the shower and sometimes when I go for a walk. It’s a joke with the neighbours that I never know what’s going on because I’m always wearing my headphones and never hear anyone knocking on the door to invite me over for tea or to tell me that the garages have been broken into again. I don’t know what I would do without music. It’s one of the greatest inspirations for my writing: I have a playlist for every project, past, current and future. In fact, once I’ve decided I’m going to turn an idea into a proper narrative, the first thing I do is set up a playlist on Spotify. The playlist I listened to when I was writing this novel has 170 songs on it and is nearly 10 hours long.

I consider myself a music addict.

And so, of course, I one day found myself wondering what being a music addict would look like in a world where music was banned. I imagined a music-obsessive creeping out of her house early one morning to meet a dealer and purchase her next hit, knowing she was breaking the law and that the punishment would be severe if she were caught. And how she would do it anyway, over and over again, because a life without music was far too bleak to bear.

This idea was only supposed to be a short story or ‘scene’, which I wrote in in about three hours, in something of a fever, and titled ‘Addict’. But, as often happens, I fell in love with my characters, Carrie and Nano, so I couldn’t just leave their story unfinished.

Once I had completed my other projects (two novels later—no one can say I’m not disciplined), I finally wrote The Dying Fall and now I’m sharing it publicly, three years after I finished it, for the very first time. I’ve never published a novel like this before, so this is a bit experimental. But I’m really happy to be sharing this story that I had a lot of fun writing. I hope you have just as much fun reading it.

I’ll be attaching a link to a song with each chapter and there is an official playlist on Spotify which you can find here: