The Sound of Forever

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Keane

Day One

I don’t know how to do this, or who I’m even writing to. My brother? Ophelia? The gaping void where my parents should have been? Maybe no one. Maybe everyone. Probably just myself.

I used to pour it all out—my thoughts, my pain, my fucking agony—into music. Into notes and lyrics that burned through me like wildfire. When music stopped being enough, I turned to my father’s stash of drugs and the liquor they had at home. It was easy. Too easy. Until it wasn’t.

Six years ago, life crashed into me like a head-on collision. Only the brakes never worked. An accident stole my future and left me in a coma. Five years. Five entire years gone, stolen, leaving nothing but a blank space where my life should’ve been.

Now, a year after waking up, I’m on the precipice of something new, but my body doesn’t feel like mine, and my mind is splintered. Rowan, my brother, thought Luna Recovery & Restoration might help me not going back to my old habits while I’m trying to recover.

So here I am, in a ninety-day program.

Ninety days.

Just ninety days to claw through the wreckage and see if there’s anything worth saving. The center is in Silverthorne Bay, a picturesque town near the base of the Olympic Mountains. It sounds like a dream, but I’m not the kind of person who belongs in dreams.

Here, they promise therapies to tame the craving, to keep me from spiraling back into the man I was—a man I can’t stand to look at anymore. Group sessions. Yoga. Holistic breathing. Shit I can barely spell, let alone believe will work. And journaling. Journaling. This is supposed to help me.

And yet, here I am. Writing. Writing because it’s either this or screaming into the void. Writing because I have nothing else.

But even as I write, I can feel her ghost at the edges of my mind. Ophelia. Philly. The woman I loved, broke, and had to let go. She’s the absence I can’t fill, the memory I can’t drown.

This is all I have and I’m not sure if I’m going to survive.