The Spirit of the Dry Ice Pellets

Let's consider the present text a stage room, and your action of reading a deliberate choice to enter said room, sit cross-legged on the carpet and watch. There are people among you, and they are the other readers of this text. They will greet you with a zen nod and silently welcome you into our atemporal gathering. I am preparing to speak. I have taken upon myself to tell you about me, and in doing so I have generated a certain kind of expectation which I feel obliged to satisfy. This is the cotton mouth, hand-trembling, turbulent-gaze, stut-stut-stuttering portion of my show, but it is necessary in order to prepare the room for the disappointment I shall soon bring upon it. For though you may be here to read a bit of testimonial prose, what I am about to disclose is a story pervaded with magic, sorcery and fantastical creatures: this is the story of the spirit of the dry ice pellets.

I was born in Curitiba, Brazil, at zero years old to a pair of then-married people, and I was presented with shoes that I could fill. What I mean by that is I was given—through no ask of my own, I was then but zero—shoes I could grow into that would help me climb the hill of life. This is what every good parent does: they say "Do this in this way and you'll be fine." Some parents may go a step further and say "Do this in this way and you'll do better than I did." So I wore those shoes decisively for years, and climbed diligently into increasingly rarefied air. And was happy doing so. When I think back to those years I am consumed by memories of gorgeous rose perfume and I ask for it all back; it was my childhood, anyway. Those shoes took me all the way to a full scholarship in aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Torino, and it was around then that I glanced up at the hill I'd been climbing all my life and thought "Wait a second. Which hill is this again?"

I must've done a thousand double-takes. It just did not seem real. There was a mist in the air that morning but after searching for them in the landscape I saw: the snowy blankets that covered the only hill I've ever wanted to climb. My hill, my distant hill. All that was left for me was to drop to the cold dirt and cry. And oh how I cried. I had never realized that the shoes you're given at birth could lead you so far astray from your soul's path. (Although in the years since I've observed this effect in many a climber.) My non-intellectual decision, then, instead of beginning to make my way to that distant hill, was to lock myself in a room with a box of dry ice pellets. You see, I had been told by shamans and wizards that dry ice pellets enclosed spirits that, if inhaled correctly, could send one into a deep slumber where the mind unlocks astounding revelations. It had always sounded like a load of crap, but as you know I was desperate and willing to try anything. So I did it, and for a while nothing happened. But soon enough, as the shamans and the wizards had described, the spirit of the pellets began to fill the air, and indeed I was sent into a deep slumber where my mind produced an astounding revelation: I would rather die at the foot of my distant hill than continue climbing this one.

That's when I made my way down and toward the snowy blankets. To my surprise, it didn't take long to be directly below them, and I began climbing again. I felt the soil beneath my feet, I smelled the azaleas and I petted the foxes, and it became clear that this is where I wanted to be. On this hill I could make films and I was ravaged by the joy of creation. If to consume art is to exchange consciousnesses, to create art is to beam your soul into a device that allows that exchange to happen everywhere, for all times, in infinitely many varying forms. If there's anything more fulfilling in this world, I haven't found it.

As a tourist on the hill seeking immigration, I started from where I could: so far I have made five little soul-beamed amateur films, but, as I must've mentioned before, I want to make more. As many as those snowy blankets can offer. Thank you for watching, you may all speak now.

Pedro de A. Silveira