Welcome to Gaia! ::

A lifetime of learning to hide his chronic anxiety behind a carefully-cultivated cool-guy facade led Taym down a steep slope to ruin as soon as he was old enough for freedom. Freedom was six years ago, and he's spent the past eighteen months or more homeless and drifting, an unwilling nomad who's exhausted his second chances and his willingness to stop trying and has nowhere to go but up... hopefully. Those who manage to get close to him might find themselves reminded of nothing so much as a stray dog, cringing and cagey and desperate for approval.


A history of less-than-savory habits and a natural well of arrogance has left Taym with no one to fall back on but himself, and he's not exactly what anyone would call reliable help. But he's working on it. He's kept clean for a couple of months, and he managed to secure a job as shop lackey at an Ashdown autoshop with more customers than hands on deck--a glorified janitor occasionally pulled in to handle an air filter or an oil change as long as no one official-looking is watching. He's keeping his head down, but being forced to live in a pay-by-the-day hotel isn't letting him get far enough ahead to find roots, and he's seriously debating another bout of sleeping rough if it will be the last sacrifice he needs to get stable--but sleeping rough opens up a whole mess of temptations that he'd rather consider permanently behind him even if the psychological cravings never really abated.

Besides the obvious reasons Taym might want a clean slate, there's this, too--his mother cut off contact eighteen months ago, and his mother and father are the guardians of Taym's five-year-old daughter. He'd always wanted, really, to do the right thing--to be there for her. And he thinks maybe (and he's thought this before, but no matter) this time he can do it, and earn his way back into the title of father.


Despite being frequently out in the wind and rain and having an intermittent hand tremor that might be nerve damage and might be psychosomatic, Taym's lighters and matches never seem to fail him, striking up on the first try. This is a good thing for a chronic smoker, and an even better thing for someone who'd really, really rather not ask a stranger for a light.



Taym is an old OC with a lot of history, getting a soft reset and some minor background retooling for Ashdown. His less-than-savory habits are probably exactly what you're imagining, but after a miserable "one-last-try" cold-turkey kick a few months back he's only had a few minor backslides, and his pre-existing criminal record is nothing significant, somehow managing to dodge any felonies (and mostly comprised of loitering and public intoxication charges, many of them bailed out and quietly disappeared by a father with connections until he'd left Georgia behind him).

He's spent most of the time in the interim outrunning his connections--he rarely stays in a place long once he's found the local "community," a task made more exhausting by the fact that sleeping rough he's likely to encounter them as a matter of course. The fundamental truth about Taym is that he wants nothing more than to take care of someone, but hasn't even figured out how to take care of himself.

He has a dog. It's a spanielish mutt named Ivy. I'ma draw her.