biography.
I kept my head down and bit my tongue / until I tasted love.
— Chelsea Wolfe, from Hisspun (2017); “Vex,”
NAME: juan diego castillo silva. AGE: forty-five. BIRTHDAY: july 7, 1975. GENDER/PRONOUNS: cis male, he/him. BIRTHPLACE: santiago, chile. OCCUPATION: diner chef (night shift).
FAMILY:
jane matthews-castillo, 46 (soon to be ex-wife)
samantha & cecilia castillo, 7 (twin daughters)
juan teodoro castillo, deceased (father)
maria leana castillo, 75 (mother)
maria lucía richardson neé castillo, 55 (older sister)
david richardson, 25 (nephew)
deacon richardson, 23 (nephew)
daniel richardson, 21 (nephew)
sean richardson, 57 (brother-in-law)
Diego never really figured out what being an adult was on his own terms. Sure, he graduated high school, and he went into college (after dropping out, as was his college girlfriend’s idea once she’d graduated), and he helped start up a store for office supplies that eventually became a huge chain across the western Americas, but for most of those years it seemed more like he was along for the ride instead of steering himself through. Even when he married said college girlfriend-- who had also become his business partner by then-- it hadn’t necessarily been because he wanted marriage, but because it was expected of him at age thirty.
He went through the motions without argument, comforted by the notion that his and his wife’s success meant that he was doing something right. With enough money coming in for them to live comfortably, Diego was told by family and friends that he must have it all, and that he must be so damn lucky. Unspoken went the fact that he was rigid about his life decisions, rigid about his schedules, and rigid about pouring everything into work and his health and other such society-decided useful things as his wife did.
“To succeed,” Diego’s father told him at his deathbed, “means to always want more and to work for it.”
So he’d followed this philosophy unflinchingly.
It didn’t occur to him, really, that he was lacking in anything. At least not until (after continuous urging from both his mother and his parents-in-law to give them grandchildren) his twin daughters were born eight years into his marriage. It was with their birth, and the fact that he found himself wanting to spend more time with them instead of working, or attending meetings, or finding new partners, or going to the gym, or going on seminars, or attending conferences, that he realised... well, maybe he wanted something else.
Slowly, gradually, Diego had begun to pull away from the things that deemed him “successful”. Over the years his hours at the office and helping run the business decreased, and over the years the nanny ended up working less and less because Diego was staying home more and more. Though he felt guilty as his wife’s work began to pile up in exchange for his having more personal family time, he found his passion for running their business dwindling, too. Hobbies that had left him after his father passed were suddenly coming back to him, and Diego had forgotten what it was like to have more than a few hours every month to indulge in them.
Eventually his wife could take no more of his crumbling interest in the business, and Diego himself had come to the startling realisation that just because he was successful and married and had two children didn’t mean that he had everything he wanted. He did not “have it all”. He was not “so damn lucky”. He’d been following the skeleton of stereotypical American success, but none of that made him nearly as happy as making cookies with his little girls in their too big kitchen.
It had been a mutual decision for Diego and his wife to divorce, in the end. Months of escalating, frequent arguments had culminated in the confession that his wife no longer felt like his wife, and Diego found himself unable to argue when so much of their being together had been because of their business partnership. He still loved her, but not so much that marriage was necessary, and when she agreed with his sentiment, they both knew what to do.
Despite the fact so much of Diego’s life had been shaped around concepts he was taught to want instead of actually wanting, he made the first impulse decision of his adult life and moved from the bustling city to the town his sister lived in, selling all his shares with the company he helped found in some attempt to wash himself clean and start anew. So unused to living without the next thirty years of his life planned out ahead of him, and afraid that he’d changed the course of his life too late (he was forty-five, for Christ’s sake), Diego now struggles to find some new definition of “normal”. On the bright side, though, at least he has his daughters with him-- in a joint legal custody situation, yes, but with his ex-wife so busy they’re with him more often than the opposite.
It feels absurd to try navigating the world at his age, and there’s a lot yet that Diego has to discover. Fortunately, his daughters are his touchstone and with them, he can face anything.
