SYLVIA DE LA FUENTE ( SHE/HER ) is a CIS FEMALE, THIRTY THREE year old CAT CAFE OWNER who has been living in Moorbrooke for FIFTEEN YEARS. They were born on APRIL 30TH and right now, they are currently residing in MAPLE COURT. It has been said that they look suspiciously like PRISCILLA QUINTANA and if they had to choose a song to describe themselves, they would choose SPACESHIP by KESHA.
trigger warning for neglect & suicide of a parent.
FULL NAME: sylvia de la fuente
NICKNAMES: syl, sylvie
SEXUALITY & PRONOUNS: bisexual, she/her
ROMANTIC STATUS: single
BIRTHDAY: april 30, 1989 (33)
ZODIAC: taurus sun, sagittarius moon, cancer rising
PETS: twelve cats named (are you ready for this?): Pope Joan, Ernest Hemingway, Congress, John Ruskin, Dulle Griet, Amelia Mignonette Thermopolis Renaldi, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charlotte Bronte, Henry Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Frida Kahlo. they mostly live at the cafe, but they come home to her apartment regularly too.
HOMETOWN: columbia, louisiana
CURRENT LOCATION: moorbrooke, maine
OCCUPATION: cat cafe owner, adjunct professor
SIBLINGS: possibly a half sibling from her dad?
PARENTS: marie de la fuente (deceased) and jack [last name unknown] (deceased)
PINTEREST: link here
sometimes people romanticize mental illness. it happens. marie de la fuente was very much one of those people. she had an obsession with sylvia plath, could recite every poem at the drop of the hat. it was a dangerous road to be on, but jack thought it was cute.
the two got married after only six months of dating, and after only a year of marriage jack knew he couldn’t do it. he’d rushed into it, but marie was pregnant now, and his sense of duty wouldn’t let him abandon the woman just yet.
she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, naming her sylvia before jack could even get a word in. he had hoped the baby would soothe her, give her something to be happy about instead of staying in love with someone else’s sadness. it didn’t work, and jack couldn’t handle it.
shortly after baby sylvia’s sixth birthday, he left the pair to fend for themselves. he ran off with a woman from down the street, and marie and sylvia found themselves alone. their smallish home slowly fell into disarray as marie became more and more erratic with her behaviors. by eight years old, sylvia was virtually taking care of herself and her mother both.
marie, an english teacher, made enough money to support the two. there was nothing lavish about their lifestyle, though. sylvia would let herself in after school, and put together sandwiches with discounted day-old bread from the bakery, and soup make from scratch-and-dent canned vegetables. how mature she is! her teachers always fawned, but sylvia knew better. she wasn’t mature, just responsible for more than a child should be.
this trait made her very popular with teachers in town, and much less popular with kids her age. as she and her mother both grew in age, marie’s eccentricity was a big source of amusement for her peers. how funny it was, the english teacher who was practically mad! and her daughter, who hardly spoke a word: who had unruly hair and old, thrifted clothes that made her skinny frame stick out like a sore thumb. despite her gentle nature, sylvia was still considered a strange girl by all means.
she spent a lot of time at home. she was fairly sheltered -- marie wouldn’t let her watch much tv, so she was limited to books & the radio. save for her mother’s study, which was kept under lock and key, the house became sylvia’s to take care of. and what a lovely cage it was for the two of them to stay in ! cooking and baking became an important habit, too: so reassuring to make a necessary action into a lovely ritual. her only solace came from art, though she was much more interested in learning about other people’s than making her own. her best & only friend as a child was the stray kitten she adopted at nine years old. throughout the years, several more cats were adopted into her care, and she loved and took care of them the same way she cared for her mother.
three days after sylvia’s eighteenth birthday, things changed. now that she was an adult, her mother considered her job done. she arrived home from a study group to find her mother with her head in the oven, asphyxiated by the natural gas. the image was burned onto the inside of her eyelids: the scrawled poetry scattered around the kitchen haphazardly. she’d searched for a note, or a letter, something personal, but there was nothing. just the words of a woman who had killed herself the same way over fifty years ago. it was a final ode to sylvia plath: a pointless suicide. it rattled sylvia deeply, and isn’t something she can imagine ever recovering from.
the only people who came to the funeral were the teachers who worked alongside marie. it was more of a show than anything, no one wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t go to a colleague’s funeral. sylvia was silent as she shook their hands, and knew she wouldn’t be able to stay in this town.
a few weeks later, a lawyer called. surprisingly, with her mother’s death came a very large sum of money: jack had passed away several years ago, leaving behind a small fortune for his abandoned child. marie had kept that to herself, and placed the inheritance and life insurance money in a bank account to gain interest. with that money, combined with what her mother willed to her, sylvia suddenly found herself in the uncomfortable position of being quite wealthy.
she finished out high school as her mother wanted. with the whispering in the hallways just grew louder and louder, until it was painfully blatant. she didn’t even walk the stage for graduation, she simply took her diploma and left town. the small house was sold for quite a profit, and sylvia moved to moorbrooke, maine and put her money into creating the small business of her dreams: a cat cafe, with every bit of it curated from her own tastes. she attended college in her free time, eventually earning a master’s degree in art history. after befriending a tenured professor at the local university, she was offered a position as an adjunct professor. she teaches a couple of art history classes a week, leaving her cafe in the care of her trusted manager.
