David Whitehead

[lanzandpine]

Name: David Whitehead
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: Southwest Red Rock High School
Hobbies and Interests: Reading, Writing, Nordic walking, Ontology, Theology

Appearance: At a stature of 6’1” or 185 cms, David is a lean, healthy-looking man with broad shoulders and long, toned legs, a bit of evidence of his constant walking, with a very slightly tanned beige skin color. His face lacks any blemishes, and his wide and round brown eyes are adorned with a couple of barely seen dark circles. He has collar-length, straight hair of a natural dark brown color that he sometimes ties up into a ponytail. David’s hands have calluses, ranging from barely felt to very obvious. If there’s an opposite of “resting bitch face”, David might as well have it, his face often wearing a relaxed, pleasant expression, and it almost seems as if something is just tugging at his lips to force him to smile.

Choosing among many styles of clothing, David often opts for light and casual attire; most often he wears unbuttoned Oxford dress shirts, usually with short sleeves, and long-sleeve T-shirts underneath, wearing black trousers and suede boots for the bottom half. He can be seen, especially in colder weather, wearing a casual blazer. He is never ever seen in any “white tie” attire, despite having all the pieces of clothing that he needs to assemble something close.

His favorite bit of clothing is a pale, almost pastel light blue cotton shirt that he wears most often on weekends or on good days, usually with a subtle scent of male citrus perfume following him each time. David has a surplus of long-sleeve, loose hoodies, but he seems to wear them rarely, if only in winter.

Biography: A well-off, calm, loving family was very happy to have had David as their second child, on the night of August 8, 2007. He never heard or saw of his sibling, and would only find out about her later in life, at a delicate time and a delicate age.

His father, a large man with a set of gray hair that only made his face look even kinder, is a professor of philosophy, a gentle, even timid person, complaining only about things that didn’t suit his, quite frankly speaking, overly refined taste. He always seems to wear either the most formal of suits or the laziest of T-shirts, never in between.
His mother is a philologist, born into a rural family, and might as well have become a pinnacle of the belief that “opposites attract”. Energetic, lively, and very loud, she somehow only complimented the quiet nature of her husband in the family. Surprisingly enough, David never ever saw them argue. Many of the family dinners felt like watching a double act.

Their parenting was relaxed, kind, and it was almost incredible to watch from the side how the parents tried their best to communicate with an endearingly active, yet childishly mischievous David. But their strategy seemed to do its work as well, as David ended up growing up into a calm-natured, yet talkative young man, with a booming voice and an even louder laugh that he doesn’t let many people hear.

Perhaps it was the nature of his parents’ work, but David was inquisitive and thoughtful. Being surrounded by books surely fueled these young feelings of his, despite dad’s rebukes about him drawing in his books on Hume and picture theory. Hazy memories of children’s books and classical adventure literature would pepper his mind throughout his whole life, a warm, homely feeling washing over him whenever they would – and they always, always inevitably did – come visit him.

Of course, with age, his interests shifted. His father being just as inquisitive as his son was, he humored David with recommended books from his own library, his mother, on the other hand, providing him with much fiction of all kinds. Most likely it was this overload that led him to a burn-out in junior high. David would come back to reading only in freshman year of high school.
David lived in a fairly modest house, despite the fact that his parents managed to have become decently well-off. Many facilities, quite luckily, were in walking distance, the farthest away being the mall, taking an hour to get there by foot. For a reason that David did not understand at the time, both parents refused to own a car, and, at most, used public transport, bicycles, or walked. The last option was something that David had to choose at the time. There he found out about Nordic walking, and in a couple of months full of sore legs and pained shoulders, he often began feeling as if the hour-long walk to the mall was something that he needed to have. Eventually, David’s confrontations with his parents regarding getting a car subsided, and he felt himself quite engaged in the process of walking, a peaceful, calm process.

At age 12, David was finally confronted by his sibling. Rather, he was confronted by what she left.
Each year, on January 22, his parents would leave, looking worn out and forlorn, and would come back looking even worse. This wasn’t something that David wanted to question, despite the disappearance of his father’s gentle smile, despite the deafening silence coming from his mother. The family dinners of January 22 always felt colder than usual.
But David couldn’t ignore this all the time. He asked and asked, and query after query would go unanswered. Suspicion and distrust grew in his mind, a slow poison, an uncomfortable feeling akin to a lump in your throat. He wondered whether his love for his parents was real. He wondered whether their love for him was real. What was real, anyway?
Once again, on another January 22, they would leave the house. They seemed to have been growing slowly more peaceful with every year, but David doubted his eyes. As his parents left, he went down to the kitchen to get something to drink, only to notice a wallet on the coffee table. Inquisitive as he was, David grabbed it, recognizing it as his dad’s. A good child would not pry into such matters, but nonetheless he opened the wallet, looking through all the pockets, all the little nicks that could hold the secrets he wanted to know about.
In one of the deeper pockets, he felt a paper card. He felt around some more. With his callused fingers, David pulled out several photographs. He gazed over them. On each photo there were his parents: younger, somehow more serious. And in all of them they surrounded a girl that he couldn’t recognize, showering her with love, with care, something that could be seen even from a picture.
The door creaked open, and as David’s father saw him looking over his photos, he seemed to go completely pale. He stammered. His breathing was heavy. David had never seen his father in such a weak, defenseless state, and all the distrust he had for him, for just a moment, was suddenly replaced by an overwhelming feeling of pity.
David handed over the wallet, and his father went back, gingerly closing the door behind him. David got back to his room and rolled himself up in bed, gripping at the sheets, the sight of his distraught dad burned into his memory.

At the family dinner, his mother stayed disconcertingly silent, and his father sat with an empty plate. They slowly, hesitantly, as if handling a dainty creature, told David about Amelia. They told him about her birth, her button nose, her cheerful laugh, their parenting, her friends at school, her interests, her favorite books, her manner of speech, her playful demeanor, her fight with their dad, on the day of which she died in because of a DUI. David listened with furrowed eyebrows to his mother, who telling him about it. His father stayed silent, save for the rarest of remarks, face buried in his hands, and David swore that he could see those hands of his shaking. That year she would’ve been 14, not much older than David.
After dinner, David went to bed early, a strange fear having come over him. For why would they not tell him? David felt as if they didn’t quite want to accept him, used him only as a substitute, a sort of tabula rasa which they could use to build their first child. For months, David struggled to talk with his father after that.

High school, despite the 2020 pandemic, despite everything, brought fresh air into the forlorn state of the family, a large weight being removed from their shoulders. David began reading once more; his parents seemed to have come to a certain, if fragile closure. Life seemed to be truly taking a turn for the new, the interesting, the better. But David could never shake off the feelings of slight fear and distrust concerning his parents.

Following in his parents’ footsteps, David is agnostic, but he got interested in theology in junior high. He claims that it is purely from an anthropological perspective, something that isn’t necessarily a lie, but often times he feels as if he needs something to grasp. He wants something to find certainty in, even if it was otherworldly.

David performs fairly well academically, although he certainly feels that there is much, much more to be done about this. He wants to go to a good university and get a higher education. He isn’t in any clubs, something that he finds a little disheartening, as he would love to find something that interests him. But this life, too, isn’t bad on its own.

Although he doesn’t do it often, David writes, much of his prose and verse having been thrown out by himself. He can’t explain the reasoning behind this, but it feels somewhat liberating from the chains of uncertainty and fear in this life.

Advantages: David is good-natured and friendly – making allies may be easier for him. His experience with Nordic walking has resulted in a fitter body, allowing him to traverse rougher land and bigger distances with relative ease; his stature may prove to be intimidating. Reading allows him to stay calm.
Disadvantages: His life has led him to become a very relaxed person when it comes to others, allowing enemies to take advantage of him much easier. Years of reading led him to worse eyesight – he can’t see too far away, worse still to his lack of glasses or eye contacts. His voice is louder than usual and it wouldn’t be much of a problem to hear him from afar.