Through the open doors, Eden stretches into dark. Fieldsrolling into shadow. Stars scattered overhead like someone took their time with them.
This kind of quiet used to scare the hell out of me.
Silence felt like a trap once. Like something was waiting in it—some old version of myself, pacing just out of sight. Stillness felt dangerous. Like if I stopped moving, I'd sink.
Now, it just feels like home.
I pull out my phone without thinking. The date glows back at me, stark and simple against the black screen. Seven years ago today. The day I got sober. The day I stopped running from myself and started building something that could last.
Just a number on a screen, unassuming. I don't count anymore, not the way I used to—marking days like battle scars, proof I survived another twenty-four hours. The number lives in me now, carved into the way I wake up, the way I breathe, the way I move through the world.
There are still mornings my body stirs too early, braced for something it doesn't have to outrun anymore.
But the noise is gone. The constant itch. The bargaining. The static.
Clarity isn't loud. That was the first thing I learned.
I built this place exactly the way I said I would, all those years ago in Málaga. Promised myself I'd make something steady. Something clean. Something that was all mine.
Meridian Studios.
Nick named it, technically. We were sitting on overturned crates when the idea clicked, beers sweating in our hands, the barn still a skeleton around us. Wind slipping through the beams. Possibility hanging in the air.
He said something about how every argument worth having starts because people forget they're standing on the same ground. That meridians aren't about division—they're about alignment.
About finding where things meet.
I didn't say much. I just knew it fit.
A place where people could come to disappear from the noisewithout disappearing from themselves. No substances. No distractions dressed up as inspiration. Just space, time, and work.
The industry didn't know what to do with us at first. A label in the middle of nowhere. No red carpets. No afterparties. No myth-making.
Just music and the freedom to become whoever you want to be in the moment.
Luiza was my first sign that the vision worked. We met in Spain seven years ago when I was still figuring out who I'd be on the other side of sobriety—touring with her band, learning that music could be medicine instead of escape. When I came back to Eden and started building Meridian, she was the first artist I called. The first one who believed in what this place could be. She slept in the loft for three months, wrote at the kitchen table with coffee rings and lyric sheets spread everywhere, cried when she finally sang a song she'd been hiding from herself. She didn't care who watched. She just needed the space to find her own voice.
That's what this place is for. Not perfection. Just truth. A place where people can be honest, can make mistakes, can find themselves without losing who they are.
And maybe that's why I've never chased fame. I'm not famous. Not really. People know my work. They know my ear. But they don't know me, and I'm grateful for that.
Awards ceremonies, red carpets—they feel like rooms built to make people louder versions of themselves. Louder doesn't mean better. Louder just means harder to hear what matters.
I don't need to be seen. I need to build things that last. Music that survives. Spaces where broken people can become whole again.
Meridian is that.
Julian finds me near the open doors, hands shoved deep into his hoodie pockets like he's afraid they'll give him away if he lets them loose.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
I nod. "Of course."
He laughs, nervous then sobers. "How do you know when to stop fixing a song?"
I let the question breathe before answering.
"When it stops needing you to protect it," I say, hands resting on the railing, fingers drumming a quiet rhythm. "When it can stand on its own."
