#joaquin

Loving the person no the medals

࿔ The book of life - Joaquín

࿔ Romantic - his nervousness around his crush leads him to constantly brag

Joaquín is admired and loved by everyone, he has become the hero he always wanted to be and that shows off in not only how much he likes to brag but also in all the attention he received, it is simple as it is

Or, rather, it isn't, he may look like a narcissist due how much he likes to show off but deep down he hasn't changed much from how he was as a kid, he shows off because he knows he is strong while doing everything he does because of a genuine wish to help and protect. He shows off and brags like a prideful kid would do because in reality he is not only proud but also excited to have something to show off, he gets giddy and even giggle when talking to Manolo about everything, he is like an excited kid playing to be a hero

And it is because of that that whenever Joaquín is with you his first course of action is to try to show off, right after managing to get over the nervousness your only presence makes him feel he starts stuttering about his latest achievements and fights while also trying to ask about you and your opinion, in his child-like innocence he believes the best way to have a chance with you it is by impress you, and, for now, you will play along all to get to know him better personally, after all the things Manolo has told you about him, about the way he gets giddy and playful when he is not overly nervous and trying to show off out of nervousness has definitely left a good impression on you, enough to give him a chance and hope that soon you will see that side of him too

Manolo Sanchez my little creep, my little weirdo❣️❣️

(Weezer reference)

They always say I know how to enter a room. As if that is a talent worth having. As if the slow smile, the hand at the small of a woman’s back, the pause before I answer a question, are things born in me and not learned under bad lights, in louder rooms, among people who mistook appetite for glamour. My life has become a series of bright surfaces, champagne sweating in silver buckets, bathroom counters dusted with powder, music that comes at you like weather, women with perfume on their wrists and laughter sharpened by midnight. There are mornings when I wake with my heart racing and have to wait for the ceiling to steady itself above me. By noon I am in sunglasses, by evening I am someone the cameras recognise, and by night I am leaning into the warm flash of another party, another opening, another beautiful disaster.

Lately I have been seen everywhere with my co-star, and the magazines love us for it. We have learned the choreography: her fingers looped through my arm, my mouth close to her ear as if I have just said something too private to survive the air between us. We know where to stand when the photographers begin shouting. We know when to laugh. Sometimes I almost believe in the ease of it myself, in the brightness we manufacture around each other. But there is a strange emptiness in being watched so closely for something that exists best at a distance. The studio calls it chemistry. The public calls it love. We never call it anything at all.

I have always thought of myself as the one who stepped out of the frame. My father built his life in shadows, in the sealed-off transactions of violence, in hotel rooms and parked cars and names written nowhere. Hitman is an ugly word, but uglier for being accurate. My brother Jeremy, who once cried when he found a bird with a broken neck on the pavement, grew into the shape of our father’s life as if it had been waiting for him all along. He was in London now, away on a job, which is how my family has always described the unnameable, as if murder were plumbing, as if blood could be entered into a calendar. I became an actor, which seemed to me an opposite fate. I put on faces for a living; they removed them. I stood in light and let strangers think they knew me. They worked in the old, faithful dark. I have told myself for years that this difference is moral, essential, clean. But blood is stubborn. Even when you run from it, it keeps your time.

My father called three nights ago. His voice was thinner than I remembered, scraped down to something metallic and tired. He said I should come home to New York. He did not ask. He never asks. It had been over a year since I’d seen him, over a year of missed calls and short messages passed through Jeremy, over a year of deciding I was too busy, that premieres and location shoots and interviews on hotel rooftops counted as a real life, one substantial enough to excuse my absence. The truth was simpler. I did not want to sit across from him and feel again the old failure of translation, that mute and familiar fact: he had never understood what I was, and I had never forgiven him for what he was. But now there was cancer, that blunt, humiliating thief inside him, and illness makes even estrangement feel theatrical. When a dying man asks for you, the refusal begins to sound childish in your own mouth.

So I looked around my apartment at the flowers being sent for the premiere, at the garment bags and scripts and two unopened bottles of vodka on the kitchen counter, at the city laid out beyond the glass in all its electric promise, and I felt the impatience rise in me like heat. I had a busy life. A real one, I kept insisting. Meetings. Rehearsals. Parties that would fold into dawn. A woman expected beside me at a red carpet in a week. Men from the studio who spoke of momentum as though it were a god that punished hesitation. Yet beneath all of that was the older map, the one that led back to my childhood home in New York where my father was waiting in whatever remained of his body, and where the rooms still held the versions of us that had done the most damage. Jeremy was an ocean away. Which meant, for once, there was no one else to absorb the blow of going home.

I booked the flight the next morning and spent the rest of the day moving through my schedule as if I had not done it. Makeup chair. Fitting. Interview. Dinner. A party afterward where someone kissed me in a hallway and someone else offered me a key balanced on the tip of a finger. All of it glittered with the usual false urgency. I smiled. I let myself be seen. But already New York had begun to darken the edges of everything. Home was there waiting for me, heavy and unslept in. My father with his ruined cells. My brother’s absence. The long corridor of things never said. I had built a life on evasion, on charm, on the trick of becoming legible only in flashes. Now I was being asked to return to the place where no performance had ever saved me.