KEALEY, LIAM NOLAN

Liam N. Kealey,

28 | HETEROSEXUAL | SINGLE | BOOKSTORE OWNER | LOCAL

FOR YOUR INFORMATION, I LOVE MY DEMONS BECAUSE THEY KEEP ME COMPANY.

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basics, NAME: Liam Nolan Kealey AGE: 28 BIRTHDAY: February 3rd SEXUALITY: Heterosexual RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single OCCUPATION: Bookstore owner FACE CLAIM: Ryan Gosling physical, HAIR COLOUR: Blond EYE COLOUR: Blue TATTOOS/PIERCINGS: A small number of irrelevant tattoos, no piercings. SCARS: Several. Most notably, a webbed mass of scarring on inside of right arm, where some track marks got severely infected. Various others, including a miscellany of average cuts and nicks, other shallower track marks, etc. HEIGHT: 6'2" WEIGHT: 190lbs internal, LIKES: books, heroin, whisky, any kind of alcohol honestly, complaining, crossword puzzles, New York, solitude, sleep, cigarettes. DISLIKES: work, anything that requires effort, family, guilt, crowds, people, noise, obligations, change, himself. FEARS: emotional intimacy; failure; becoming his father. ASPIRATIONS: to get (and stay) clean and sober; get published; find some way to be happy in some form or another. PERSONALITY: i. ABRASIVE Probably the first thing one is likely to notice about Liam is that he's kind of an ass. If you have to deal with him in any kind of shallow or passing capacity, you're likely to come away with the impression that he's deeply unpleasant. Often grumpy for no apparent reason and - even when he's not, liable to pretend that he is just so people won't talk to him - Liam has a tendency to be short with and dismissive of other people. Sarcastic and rude, talking to him can be like trying to navigate a minefield, because he's so pedantic that if you slip up, he's going to call you on it  in the most condescending way possible. It's not that he doesn't understand tact, he just doesn't really see the point in it unless it's some kind of special occasion or something. Unsure how to express any kind of genuine affection, he can be this way even with people he likes, so there's no real way to avoid this behaviour. It's just kind of something you have to tolerate if you spend any great amount of time with him.  ii. INTELLIGENT The second thing one is liable to notice about Liam is that he's pretty damn clever. Despite the crude and lowbrow wit he tends to fall back on, it's obvious there's some actual intellect at work here. Academic and analytical, if you give him some kind of abstract problem to solve, he can probably do it. Real world application of intelligence and logic is another matter entirely and something he's not so good at, so arguably he's the wrong kind of clever, but still. Philosophical and introspective, it can often appear that Liam is only half-involved in the real world, which is a fair point. He's liable to absent-mindedness and forgetfulness, because he's always often in his own head thinking about this or that irrelevant thing. This kind of useless intelligence means that Liam is the kind of person who has a strong opinion about nearly everything and is so bullheaded and stubborn that he'll argue about it until everyone else loses the will to live, which adds a whole other layer of intolerable to his personality. Although he would never outwardly change his mind or admit to being wrong, having the kind of mind that is always questioning and re-evaluating and analysing means that he is always overthinking, making himself paranoid and neurotic and tying himself round in knots. Smart or not, Liam's brain is its own worst enemy. iii. APATHETIC Despite a tendency to kind of work himself up internally with all this overthinking, Liam is much too lazy to act on any of his irrational paranoia most of the time. He is probably the most apathetic person you're likely to meet. In between bouts of opinionated arguing and drunken idiocy, he's a very reserved and low energy person. Firmly against anything that requires the slightest of unnecessary effort or even the slimmest chance of embarrassing failure, Liam is much more inclined to live his life in as passive and easy a way as possible. He doesn't take risks or let himself get involved or really try very hard at anything, and is quite happy just staying indoors by himself if he gets half the chance to do so. He's much too set in his ways to want to deal with change of any kind or to really... want to live, pretty much. His apathy pretty much comes hand in hand with a kind of crippling depression that he's never really sought help for, but it's likely that even without a chemical imbalance for an excuse, he would still be one of the laziest people alive. iv. PROTECTIVE After getting to know Liam a little better, it does become apparent that he's not all bad. One of his more obvious better traits is his extremely protective streak. Liam is a big brother, and for many years, he let his familial role define him, so it is still something that comes as natural to judge people by how vulnerable they are and want to protect them accordingly. He likes to cast himself in the role of watcher, because it makes him feel as though he is doing something good. He will never be a nice or conventionally good person, but he is fiercely loyal to the people he cares about and won't let anyone take any shit. It is the one scenario where his aggressively argumentative trait becomes a good thing - Liam is the first person to jump to someone else's defense and will always remain there long past the point of common sense. This does mean he has a tendency to not let people fight their own battles, and also a sort of problematic habit of becoming... possessive over others. Once he has adopted somebody as friend, surrogate sibling, family, they are his and he can be a little overbearing. But all in all, his fierceness when it comes to the wellbeing of his loved ones is mostly a good thing. It's one of the few ways he's capable of showing that he genuinely cares. v. DECENT At his core, Liam is a decent person. He guards this fact as though it's some kind of deep, dark secret, much preferring to play up his negative traits and make himself out to be a complete asshole. He's more used to being received as such, and has always been a little unsure about people knowing that he has this shameful soft side. Liam is better than he or anyone else tends to give him credit for. Although his surly demeanour can sometimes seem like cruelty, it is more an attempt to keep people at a distance than anything else. He'd just prefer to be left alone, and generally appearing unapproachable tends to help with that. Despite what kind of persona he projects, Liam's never really intentionally or personally malicious. He doen't set out to hurt or otherwise make things complicated for other people without good reason. Furthermore, he has an absolutely astounding capacity for love - once he's let a person in, he'll do anything for them, and he'll be unwaveringly loyal and devoted right up until the bitter end.  He is not a bad person. He just tries too hard to act like it. the lines, MOTHER'S NAME, AGE & OCCUPATION: Molly Kealey, deceased FATHER'S NAME, AGE & OCCUPATION: Francis Kealey, 52, unemployed SIBLING NAME(S), AGE(S), OCCUPATION(S): Talia Kealey, 24, unknown PET(S) - SPECIES, BREED: n/a CHILD(REN) NAME(S), AGE(S): n/a the past, BIRTHPLACE: Boston, MA FIRST FRIEND: His name was Mickey. He lived three apartments down from where Liam grew up. They were born five weeks apart, and their mothers were friends. Up until Liam's died abruptly when he was four, anyway. They went to the same school and used to race each other home. Once, Mickey pushed Liam down the stairs of their apartment building and he broke his arm. Liam repaid the favour as soon as his arm was healed by breaking his nose. They dropped out of school within a month of each other when they were seventeen, and spent the latter few years of their adolescence wasting their lives in tandem. Mickey was later responsible for supplying and fueling Liam's heroin addiction. They haven't been in contact since Liam left Boston. He doesn't really give a shit where Mickey ended up. FIRST LOVE: Her name was Kate. They met in Liam's final year of college. She was a grad student, getting her doctorate in critical theory. Criticism suited her. The almost two years that they were together were toxic, laden with criticism, picking holes in each other, opening old wounds and leaving brand new ones. She was a bitch. Liam wasn't exactly an angel either. They bought out the worst in each other, but he loved her anyway. Kind of. Mostly. At least he thinks he did. He loved that she challenged him, fought him, pushed him... he just didn't like what she was pushing him to be. They never technically broke up, but when he came home to their shared apartment and found all her belongings gone and a dismissive voicemail on his answering machine, he got the message. FIRST MEMORY: Aged four. He remembers that the sky was clear and blue, and that it was unseasonably warm. He remembers standing between his uncle and his father, and looking at his baby sister tucked into her stroller, parked in the shade beneath a tree. In hindsight, he thinks he remembers the funeral that came before this moment and the lowering of the coffin into his mother's grave that came directly after, but the only clear definitely real thing is how warm it was, and how blue the sky was, and holding his uncle's hand and watching his sister kick at her blankets in the shadowy stroller, and not being entirely sure what was happening or why everybody was crying. BEST MEMORY: Aged twenty one. He remembers sitting on the train and watching Boston recede out of the window. It was his first time leaving the city and the last time that he would ever see it. In the seven years since, he hasn't been back. He was on the train for a couple of hours and when he disembarked, he was in new state, new town, with a whole new chapter of his life stretching out before him. College were his best years. Leaving Boston to go was the best thing he ever did. WORST MEMORY: Aged seventeen to twenty. He can't remember this period of his life very well. It all blurs together into one big miscellaneous bad memory. He remembers needles and veins, infections, overdoses, a confused jumble of violence and petty crime, and once or twice, the temporary inside of a drunk tank or jail cell. He remembers disappointment and feeling so sick that he was sure he was going to die, and being so cold all the time, and getting so thin he could see his bones, and realising that if he kept going he was definitely going to die... and then realising that there was no one left to even give a shit if he did. That was the worst period of his life. HISTORY: i. CHILDHOOD Liam was born into a working class family of Irish-American Catholics. His parents were relatively young and only just married. His father was rather fond of telling him he was an accident, and that was even before he turned abusive. He has one younger sister, Talia, born just after he turned four. His mother died three months later. She worked as a bank teller and was shot four times in the torso in a clumsy robbery. She died almost instantly. This was never really a comfort to anybody. After her death, his father - always a drinker - spiraled into full blown alcoholism. The only reason Liam and his sister survived was because of their uncle Nolan, their father's younger brother. The rest of the extended family turned a blind eye to their plight, but he kept coming back to check on them. Their father was too much of a drunk to work and spent most of their welfare money on more booze, so it was down to their uncle to keep them fed and clothed and attempt to keep them content. He couldn't be there all the time, however, so while he took care of the big things, Liam took responsibility for the day to day care of his sister. While their father got worse and worse, Liam had to grow up and step into the role of parent. After all, someone had to teach his sister how to tie her shoes and read her to sleep and hold her hand when they crossed the street. Their father was mildly abusive, but Liam took the brunt of that too. It was largely verbal and as such mostly drunken nonsense. All the physical abuse stopped when Liam grew to be bigger and stronger than him. Still, it was always a fear that he would not be able to protect his sister from him. The thought of her suffering was always terrifying to Liam. ii. ADOLESCENCE This was where it all began to fall apart. Liam had managed to foster an identity in spite of his father constantly trying to tear him down, but it was largely built around being the dutiful older brother. That was who he was. That was what he existed to do. Look after Talia, work to bring in money so that Talia could have a better standard of life, keep himself healthy and together so that Talia had a role model... It worked for a while. When she was an unquestioning child who looked up to him and loved him and appreciated all he did. But she grew up, as children are wont to do, and because she had no one else, it was Liam that she began to rebel against. Testing her limits, seeing what she could get away with, and Liam - so immature still himself - responded by trying to tighten his hold on her. To control her. Obviously this didn't work, and she pulled away even harder. Without the love of his sister, there was very little anchoring Liam to his life, and he began to spiral. At first it was just relatively harmless underage drinking, but he soon found his way into the world of substance abuse. His experimentations lead him to heroin. Heroin lead him off the rails. He dropped out of school, moved out, and got mixed up in some fairly dodgy criminal activity in order to fund his newfound expensive habit. His sister made a last ditch attempt to attract his attention again by getting herself involved with one of his low life friends, but Liam was too far gone to notice. Well, no, he noticed. He just sat by and watched her get involved deeper and deeper, watched the bruises start to appear and watched as she learnt to carefully cover them and lie about where they came from, and he didn't do a thing. He didn't have it in him to care enough by then. Besides, he couldn't risk jeopardising his heroin supply chain by starting to call out his friends. iii. COLLEGE Just before he turned twenty, his uncle - who had been deliberately not speaking to Liam for some time, in a bizarre misguided attempt to shame him into getting clean - suddenly ended up getting arrested. Petty crime has always run in the family, but his uncle took it too far when a bar fight got out of hand and he found himself facing manslaughter charges. Something about this disturbed Liam, even through his opiate haze. He realised he was going to end up the same way - or worse. Neither prison nor being dead in a gutter especially appealed to him, and this epiphany was followed by the first of many detoxes. He eventually got clean for the first time in several years, and the joy of clarity surprised him. He decided to get his life back on track, and began attending night classes to belatedly get his high school diploma. This lead to applying for colleges, and he eventually ended up at Bowdoin, in Maine, where he majored in English. He spent the whole of college slipping in and out of addiction, and this whole period of his life is characterised by struggling to get clean... but also by a pervasive sense of hope that maybe he could get clean and that life could be better from here on out. He was kind of wrong on that count, but Liam experiences optimism so rarely that he still counts the very concept of it as a win. He graduated four years later, thought about returning as a grad student, and then decided against it. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do, especially, except write. That was an old ambition, harboured since he first discovered literary escapism as a child. College saw a few essays and short stories see limited, semi-professional publication, but he wanted to do better. He wanted to do the whole thing properly. He spent a year working part time, trying to write, failing, and becoming increasingly frustrated... and promptly found himself stuck in a rut. iv.: NEW YORK An opportunity for change came in the form of his long term girlfriend abruptly leaving him with no explanation. Liam was not best pleased by this turn of events, but eventually it began to seem like a good thing. Now with nothing tying him to the same old college town, he decided to pick up and leave. Leaving had worked for him five years before, when he'd finally packed up and left Boston. It would hopefully help him now. He moved to New York, partially because he missed the bustle and anonymity of a city and partially because it was some vague childish idea in the back of his head that this was where writers went. This was where things happened and goals were achieved and important books were written. His slight burst of optimism was, again, misplaced. Shortly after moving to New York and getting an apartment and settling in, he realised he was still relatively uninspired. He found himself working in a secondhand bookstore to pay the bills and pass the time. It was the kind of store mostly staffed by college students working a stop gap job while they studied. This was relatively irritating to Liam, who quickly became disgruntled by seeing people who knew what they wanted, or witnessing them come and go and move onto better things. He thought again about going back to school, doing his masters, but... it seemed like so much effort. He was struggling with his addiction again. He was beginning to feel tired of trying. v. NOW Not much has changed since he first came to New York two years ago. He still lives in the same dingy apartment in the same shitty neighbourhood. He still works in the same secondhand bookstore. He still struggles with addiction. He still wants things he's too tired to actually achieve. There are only a few things that have changed. He has mostly given up on writing, on wanting things, on even trying to get clean or to be more than he is. He now no longer works in the bookstore so much as owns it. Or at least leases it. When the old owner retired, Liam was the only consistent staff member around to take over the reigns. He was comfortable there, and it seemed like less effort to just work a little harder than it would be to find a whole other job and have to break it in. And there is now a girl, a beautiful excitable blonde, who will not leave him alone. Who is sometimes waiting for him in his dingy apartment in his shitty neighbourhood when he gets home, just because she wants to see him. He is in love with her. That's new. But like everything else it feels fleeting, temporary, a passing desire that will never actually come to fruition. It's always the same. Life is always going to be like that for him.

PUN | GMT | 21 | EVELYN AUTUMN KENNEDY, DOMINIC CALEB WILDER &
EZRA JACOB MCDOWELL

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ACCEPTED

ohai soulmate~ looks like grumpy cat is finally finished so yaaaay! off to accepted land he goes!