Oxford Raiment {District 8}

The first thing anyone notices about Ford is not his goofy, almost boyish mouth, but instead the serious nature of his eyepatch against which his generally unserious countenance is contrasted. By far his defining feature, followed by the handful of surrounding scars, this black eyepatch has been the replacement for Ford's left eye since he was sixteen. His remaining eye is a dark, muddy brown, with a characteristically dejected droop to its lid, a testament to his defeated demeanor, which is made even more apparent by his heavy, low-sitting eyebrow.

The dark brown of his remaining eye matches his untrimmed hair almost perfectly. His wavy and unkempt mop often contains strands that stick up in odd places and are often matted with dirt and grease. After all, what reason does a mere warehouse worker have to maintain his appearance? Ford cares enough to shave occasionally, but this is more out of embarrassment for his patchy stubble than anything else.

Living somewhat comfortably for a denizen of Panem, Oxford is just barely underweight, standing six feet, two inches and weighing one hundred forty pounds. He isn't exactly scrawny, as his job of loading the district's products onto trains has provided his frame with a fair amount of muscle, but his ribs are still apparent (though not prominent) when he removes his shirt. From his job, Ford has a great deal of strength and endurance: he can work from sunup to sundown with few breaks in between. His long legs would make him a quick runner, if he could motivate himself to move at anything but a slow, steady pace.

As a direct result from the accident in which he lost his eye, Ford has a decreased appetite for life. He used to be deeply and easily engrossed in the beauty of the world around him, drawing inspiration from even the most simple things in nature. However, since he lost his eye, Oxford has failed to see much point in anything. He does his work, keeps his head down, and quietly hates the world.

He never had an easy time making friends, even before his accident. Blunt to the point of being abrasive, Ford had a knack for unintentionally keeping people away. It wasn't that he was a complete loner; he did have his small group who tolerated him and were even amused by his frankness. He still has a handful of friends, though they have been kept at an arm's length since he lost his eye. Strangers, however, don't typically appreciate Oxford's unapologetically abrupt demeanor, and generally have a negative opinion of him after dealing with him.

Illustrated by the accident which altered his life entirely, Ford often behaves rashly and without regard to consequence or safety. He is something of a loose cannon, and seldom considers end results when doing anything. This impulsiveness, when coupled with his blunt demeanor, has occasionally gotten him into brawls with others, from boys his own age to men twice his size. He doesn't often win, due to his lack of brawn, although the fights are typically broken up before any serious damage is done to either party. On the whole, Oxford is a generally disagreeable person, though not notoriously so, as he has, as of late, steered clear of much social interaction.

From a young age, Ford had an eye (well, two) for beauty. He'd always been so sure that he would become one of the rare few who would be blessed with what he considered to be the most glorious career in District 8: design. As a little boy, he closely followed the Hunger Games; not for the thrill of the competition, not to study up in case he was reaped, but instead for the style. The beautiful (and gaudy) costumes always enchanted him, and he envied the infinite resources of the Capitol stylists. At the very back of his mind, he longed to be reaped for the Hunger Games, not for the fighting or the glory of victory, but instead for the fashion, and for the opportunity to experience the impressive style first hand.

Out of this love of fashion was born a deep attraction to aesthetic beauty, to symmetry and to patterns and the shocking allure of their unexpected disruption. Even though he couldn't do anything besides occasionally draw his visions, Ford Raiment always had an endless stream of muse running through both his conscious and unconscious mind. He came to enjoy anything he could draw inspiration from: the dawn, the clouds, the precise and intricate weaving of veins on leaves. Above all, Ford was enchanted with fire. He loved the gradient of color as flames grew taller, the curl of a sheet of paper as the fire traveled towards his hand, threatening to singe his fingers, the blaze of a match head as it ignited.

This moderate pyromania, however, ruined things for Raiment, who had taken to experimenting with burning different compounds and dyes to produce flames of different stunning displays of light. One late night, at the age of sixteen, he was experimenting burning fertilizer that he'd nicked from the cotton fields mixed with magnesium that he'd bought on the black market from some shady fellow who'd gotten it from District Three. The mixture was in a glass tumbler (test tubes and the like being unavailable to a boy in his district) which exploded when the fire hit a pocket of potassium nitrate in the unevenly distributed contents of the fertilizer, sending large fragments of glass everywhere, most notably his dominant left hand and eye, as well as the surrounding socket and cheek areas. His eye was completely wrecked and was later fully removed by a doctor (for a steep price) to keep any infections from spreading. Ford began wearing his eyepatch.

The real shame here was not the loss of his eye, but the loss of his appetite for beauty. He still recalls the brilliance of the last flash that triggered the accident, and nothing has even come close to comparing. He became listless and far more downtrodden, giving up his life's dream of fashion design in favor of a transportation job, loading bolts of cloth and boxes of mass-produced garments onto trains for the consumption of the other districts. His head no longer filled with designs, Ford resigned himself to a cynical life without beauty, to the same meaningless existence of both the sheep in the fields of his district and the people who tended them.

is this okay?