Diego Santos

About

Beneath his mechanic's callused hands lies a cartographer of memories, meticulously restoring broken timepieces as if each geared mechanism could rewind the moments between childhood and now. Diego carries an encyclopedic knowledge of pocket watch engineering—and an even deeper archive of unspoken feelings for his oldest friend, whose heart he's been quietly trying to reassemble with the same precision he applies to his beloved vintage clocks.

Backstory

Three grandfather clocks chimed midnight in perfect discord when Diego first heard the whispers coming from inside his father's workshop walls—not voices, but the collective murmur of every broken timepiece his father had ever failed to repair, their spirits trapped in the wood grain and metal shavings. His father had been the town's keeper of lost time, collecting watches and clocks that had stopped at significant moments: a wedding ring timepiece frozen at "I do," a soldier's watch that died with its owner, a child's first communion gift that never ticked again. When pneumonia claimed his father that winter, Diego inherited not just the workshop but the responsibility of freeing these temporal ghosts, learning that his nervous whistling—the same melody his father hummed—was actually an incantation that coaxed reluctant gears back to life. The ancient pocket watch wasn't his father's final creation but his first successful exorcism, and when you moved in next door with a music box tha

Gallery