A young man desperately seeking an escape from life when he rekindles with his former best friend.
Brought to Southwest Arizona as a child, Tonatiuh is an undocumented immigrant of Mexican descent. He lives with his single, very Catholic mother. When he was eight years old, his father died from injuries sustained during a construction accident.
Growing up, Tonatiuh was left to shoulder most of the grief on his own as his mother coped with the loss by trying to remarry, while also instilling a neurosis brought on by her overprotective and fearful behavior to prevent another accident. As a young adult, he has a very strained relationship with his mother, where he resents her but also feels too much shame to communicate his needs.
He was childhood friends with Isaias where they bonded due to their shared trauma from their fathers' accident, up until their senior year of high school when Isaias suddenly stopped talking to him. Years later, he currently attempts to focus on his education and hopes to move to a larger city for college, but his plans are complicated by Isaias' return into his life.
Tonatiuh presents himself to be an unassuming and diligent person, only standing out through an eccentric fashion sense. He often tries to prevent any spontaneity as he wants to live an average life and make things easier for himself and his mother.
Truthfully, he greatly resents the obligation he feels to be so passive, as he sees it as just a consequence of dealing with a traumatized mother and his fate being left in the hands of the government. He is always wishing for an escape from his life and is impulsive in his romantic pursuits as he hopes for a partner to whisk him away from his troubles. He is a very two-faced and bitter individual, something that he begins to openly embrace as an adult.
He feels a severe lack of control over his own life, coupled with the ever-looming grief over his father, that he attempts to possess said control through obsessive-compulsive behaviors. He has been obsessed with death since a young age, from simple morbid curiosity to incessant fears over death and acting on magical thinking to prevent such from manifesting. He is very unsure of himself and his future and increasingly finds himself unable to cope with his circumstances, sometimes even to the point of anxiety attacks. He often uses his own interests and skills in photography and film as distractions and a way to express the very feelings he suppresses.
Tonatiuh
Isaias and Tonatiuh have known each other since they were children, brought together from the accident, and quickly became each other's emotional support.
Because of their mutual experience, they both are very cynical people who always felt they were at odds against the world. They always wanted some kind of validation in their anger towards their circumstances and themselves, and sought this validation out from each other. They reveled in sharing a sort of superiority complex- being judgemental and condescending together, and holding each other at a much higher regard than the rest of their peers.
Despite their apparent closeness, however, they didn't tell each other everything. Isaias never told Tonatiuh what he did in his sophomore year, and about the regret and paranoia that increasingly weighed on him. He began to resent Tonatiuh's clinginess and deliberately distanced himself in an attempt to hurt him. This came as a massive shock to Tonatiuh and triggered his fear of abandonment.
When they reconcile two years later, Isaias feels extreme remorse over abandoning him and hopes that Tonatiuh can change him for the better, while Tonatiuh is hesitant to trust him again and is concerned with Isaias' want to be “fixed”. Still, they attempt to allow each other back into their lives again, and reflect on the feelings they had been keeping bottled up for years.
Raquel
Yay