picture perfect

i. basics

NAME paloma grace martín NICKNAMES loma, lo AGE twenty-seven DATE OF BIRTH 11.11.98 ZODIAC scorpio HOMETOWN brooklyn, nyc PLACE OF RESIDENCE manhattan, nyc EDUCATION columbia university, ba ( english ) OCCUPATION co-host of "rise & shine", valmont media LANGUAGES english, bahasa indonesia, spanish GENDER cis woman PRONOUNS she / her ORIENTATION straight ( ? )

ii. appearance

FACECLAIM cindy kimberly HAIR dark, thick waves EYE COLOR brown EYE SHAPE doe-shaped, heavy lidded HEIGHT 5'7" ( 170 cm ) SCENT byredo mojave ghost

iii. relationships

PARENTS cynthia nelwan martín, emanuel martín ( deceased ) SIBLINGS none ROMANTIC PARTNER tba EXES tba

iv. personality

POSITIVE TRAITS luminous, perceptive, grounded, magnetic, compassionate, genuine NEGATIVE TRAITS inscrutable, guarded, restless, withholding, reckless, calculating MBTI infj LOVE LANGUAGE quality time + words of affirmation

v. wanted connections

TBA.

biography ( incomplete )

there was nothing much remarkable about the third floor of a brooklyn walkup. her mother worked. her father had worked. there was enough. not abundance, but enough. what the household lacked in excess it compensated for in steadiness. paloma grace martín grew up in a family that had made something from very little and wore that fact without shame. she grew up cared for, which she has learnt since then is the rarer thing.

the columbia acceptance arrived on a thursday in march, and the their little apartment became the happiest place on earth. her mother wept. her father, who had never been a sentimental man, held her in his arms, and she saw a teardrop fall from his eyes.

she graduated four years later, summa cum laude, with her mother in the third row and her father beside her, wearing the columbia logo print tie she had bought him as a joke.

as it does when your name doesn't mean anything to anyone in a room, she started at the local news, worked the hours nobody else wanted, covered the stories nobody else pitched for, and learnt how to make herself impossible to ignore. after all, talent without a stage is simply potential, unrealised. she was twenty six when her first segment aired. that changed everything. america knew who paloma martín was, and america adoredher.

and that's when she got the offer. a co-host seat, on the coveted " rise & shine " , the morning news and talk show at valmont media. strictly speaking, it was not what she had been building towards. she was a journalist, the serious kind. morning television is completely different. but " rise & shine " was the most watched morning program in the country, the biggest stage cable tv had to offer. there's no way anything could top that. and not beside strangers. beside the two people she had watched every morning since she was thirteen. this was an opportunity to work for her idols. though, technically, they were her equals now. no one in their right mind would say no to that.

she had been in the chair for three weeks when her father died.he died in february, in florida, three months into the retirement he had waited thirty years for. she booked the first flight out of new york before she called her producer, still in the blazer from tapings. and it was there, through a wall, in the small hours of a grief-fractured night, that she learned something that made her question everything she thought she knew about the ground beneath her feet.

paloma was not meant to hear it. it did not come in the form of a conversation prepared with care, delivered with the gravity it required. it came in the particular dissolution of a woman who had kept something for twenty-seven years and in the wake of loss, could not hold it in any longer. an affair. her mother was young, and he was older and married and powerful. he does not know. it was a mistake.

she did not speak of it. she thought naively, that if she did not speak of it, it wouldn't be true.the next morning she booked a car to the airport. she hugged her mother at the door. longer than usual, tighter than usual, and did not look back at the house as the car pulled away.

he does not know she exists. this is the part she finds herself repeating in her head most often. to question the foundation is to question everything built upon it, and paloma has built quite a lot.

he does not know, and therefore nothing in her life has been arranged. no doors have been held open by invisible hands. no calls have been made on her behalf by a man who does not know her name. she had built a career on her own, on her own merits. sure, maybe the offer had came sooner than she had planned for and it was bigger than she ever dreamt of. but she had earned it, and she deserved it. right? she is almost certain of it.

now, she is working very hard at being certain of it. this is what she knows: she was able to afford columbia due to careful saving and what she understood to be a scholarship, as the reward for being a good student who did everything she could with what she had. she did not think to look for another explanation, because until very recently, she was not someone who had any reason to doubt that she did not earned everything she had. and her father, dad, who raised her without condition, who was in every way that mattered her father, may have known something she now will never be able to ask him about. which means certain questions have closed permanently and many more have materialised in their place.

so she keeps herself busy with work. but now she knows a man, who could be very close to her but is more likely very far away, so far that their paths will never cross.