#michaelvlamis

~ Michael Guerin & Alex's smile...

Same look, stronger love, more than 10 years later...❤ ~

MAKING IT - Magic Mike Abs

No you never looked away

Now I can’t look away

I could build your heart a home

And if I did

Would you come home?

Wish I’d found the words when we were 17 ...

You were the best of me

“Don’t mess with Texas.”

John Martin is thirty years old. He/him is employed as  an artist/ gallery owner. 

☆ PAST

Trigger Warnings: Alcoholism, Death

John is the only child of parents who didn’t particularly want children. His dad was a severe alcoholic who did very little if anything to help raise John until he passed away when John was fourteen due to renal failure. John’s mother was a tough woman and worked two jobs to keep the house and put food on the table. For that reason, he was left at home to his own devices, but once John’s best friend’s grandparents caught wind of it, John was taken in on a regular basis by his best friend’s family. Growing up a somewhat happy kid in small-town West Texas, John and his best friend were inseparable until John’s dad passed away. As soon as that happened, John went from listening to emo rock and playing video games to being thrust into a world of dust and country music as he started working on a ranch at the age of fourteen. Over that summer, he went from a pudgy boy who was to be a lineman on the high school football team to a strong, slimmed-down teenager who walked around drawling his words and shoving his jeans into his boots. The girls went wild over John who was now a running back on the football team, a freshman on the varsity team, being on the ranch had taught him a lot about reading others and hard work. Unbeknownst to John, his best friend was in love with him and John put him through the wringer in terms of talking about what he got up to with girls. By the time they were seniors, John was one of the most popular kids in school while his friend was an outcast, but still, John’s best friend who John protected from bullying every way he could. However, John couldn’t quite explain his unusual need to be vehemently protective of the other boy, at least not until Senior Night after graduation. John was in the hayloft in a barn with his girlfriend on her daddy’s farm and peeling off clothes as they got sweaty and grabby with one another. His best friend was in the farmhouse, feeling lonely and went looking for John only to come across John and his girl. John and his friend met eyes before the friend scrambled back down the ladder and John started to follow after him, realizing there were feelings between them. The girl tried to stop John, threatened to tell the whole school that he was into guys, but John shoved her off him, grabbed his hat, and ran after his best friend, catching up to him in the parking lot where they shared their first kiss. The next four years were the best of John’s life. His smarty-pants boyfriend was gone to college but came home nearly every weekend to visit John and his family. John eventually saved enough money from working as a cowboy on the ranch to put a down payment on a trailer that he parked just outside of town. Everything was perfect, except that his boyfriend wanted to go to grad school in Houston which was twelve hours away. John insisted he could handle it, but as soon as the boyfriend was gone for more than two weeks, John fell apart. He started drinking and fighting at the bars.

By the time the semester was over and his boyfriend came home, John was unrecognizable. He was barely hanging onto his job and trailer and had many spills into the county drunk tank to his name. Upset, the boyfriend told John he couldn’t trust John at his word anymore. John lost it and ended up cheating on him that very night. In the coming days, the love of John’s life broke up with him and left him a broken man. John waited and waited for his ex to return but it never happened, so he decided to push himself into something by going back to work on another ranch. The problem was, John could never stay sober and he ended up further and further away from his mama and the small town of Hermosa. In fact, he ended up going so far he was nearing El Paso. He sold his trailer and started rooming in a cabin on another ranch with three other hands as he lived paycheck to paycheck. Realizing he had enough of that life, John entered vocational school, thinking he’d become a welder or HVAC man, something. What he really became put all that to shame. When John first started welding, he wasn’t very good, or so his teacher said. He was terrible at sticking to the rules. Some might say that sounded like John Martin. Always having a way with words, he convinced his teacher to let him have supervised space in the shop on nights without class. He started out with older students overseeing him as he played around with welding together magnetic metal scraps into nothing or so he thought. The man who oversaw John bought his creation and gifted it to his wife and it still sits in their yard today. By the third class, John was ready to start his apprenticeship and he had all kinds of wild-looking sculptures sitting around the school. About then, a man in a suit and ten-gallon hat came from El Paso looking to put John in their art school.

☆ PRESENT

To this day, John feels like he never learned much about art in art school, but he thanks it for turning him on to glass blowing and lighting pierces, and damn sure credits art school with getting him a show at an art gallery. He won’t say proudly that art got him off the bottle and fighting, but he’ll acknowledge that it helped. Blows his boots off that somehow his worked traveled around the southern United States and ended up in a town just outside of Atlanta called Serenity. John’s come to this town with the promise from his own proud mouth that he’ll sell his work to townsfolk and tourists alike. He’d dare you if he wanted the competition, but just so happens he’s going to be fine.