Some fears take shape in statistics; others in silence. When I began researching what would become Decay, I didn’t set out to write about radiation, folklore, or even the weight of the earth itself. I set out to write about unease. The kind that lingers when landscapes seem altered, when stories carry warnings you cannot quite dismiss, when headlines turn risk into panic.

Some places feel heavy before you even know their history. The silence of a deserted street. The rusting shell of a factory. A forest clearing where nothing grows. Whether it’s the exclusion zone around Chernobyl’s “Red Forest” or the abandoned fishing towns near Fukushima, these spaces carry a weight that goes beyond what the eye can see.

When I travelled to Östersund while preparing Decay, I wasn’t only looking at maps and weather patterns. I was listening. The forests in Jämtland and across the Västernorrland border carry a silence that is never just absence. It is a silence full of weight, a silence that presses. People there know it. They have always known it. And when they lacked the language of radiation or soil instability, they gave that silence form in story. I found myself drawn to those stories.