A Life in Stories

            According to my mother, I’ve been telling stories ever since I could pick up a pencil and scribble down the events of the day’s trip to the local museum in the form of rough interpretations of the indigenous art that I observed.  When my parents owned a record player in our old house in Porto Velho, my home town located in the Amazon regions of Brazil, I would listen to old fairy tale records, imagining that somewhere in some invisible dimension, these voices and sounds were being sent to me so that I could picture them in my mind.
            My best friend Otavio and I used to venture around our enormous backyards pretending they were adventurous lands, making up stories and quests for ourselves as we went along.  In later years we would hide mission debriefs for each other to uncover and create mysteries to solve.  After Otavio moved away, most of the short stories or cartoons that I would write when I went to elementary school at the “Centro Educacional e Experimental A Chavinha” involved all of the nine students in my class in some sort of heroic adventure, inspired by C. S. Lewis, Indiana Jones, and the scary dreams I had about my next-door neighbors, who used to reach over the fence to steal from our passion fruit tree.
            During my entire middle school experience at the “Instituto Gomes Amora”, I spent all of my weekends with my best friend Adriano.  We spent hours into the night unraveling the deep secrets of “Gabriel Knight” and “Grim Fandango”, artistic computer games containing real characters and plot lines that developed throughout the course of two or three months - rather than two hours like a movie or a couple of weeks like a novel.  During this time, Adriano went to a different school, and I had always wanted to knock on his door to make friends with him, but was too shy.  If it weren’t for my father, who convinced me not to be afraid and accompanied me all the way to his house, I would never have gotten to know one of my best friends.
            On Sundays, we would go to his farm and play soccer with all his relatives.  Unbeknownst to me, on one of the afternoons that I was there, the Malaria virus infiltrated my bloodstream and created much havoc in my system for several weeks.  It was also at his farm where I experienced the event of largest scale of excitement in my life: the 1994 World Cup.  The entire nation of Brazil exploded with energy when their team defeated Italy in the final game.  This is how I learned to recognize the flags of so many different countries - I would accompany every game, checking off the scores of the teams on a magazine my grandfather gave me.  Even though he lived all the way across the country, he still made the effort to instill the soccer spirit in me.  I only regret not having seen him before he passed away this July, only two weeks prior to Brazil winning the World Cup a second time.
            During the difficult transitions that have taken place in the past four years, I progressively acquired a fascination for darker themes.  It was in my first year at “Burlington High School” that I was introduced to the oddities of American social patterns, and the awkwardness of adolescence.  These I disguised with fictional accounts of distorted worlds, and with the help of my new friend Jimmy, transposed them onto paper.  One disconcerting event after another, followed by the Columbine Shootings rendered much of my high school experience almost unreal.
            Returning to the comfortable tradition of storytelling, me and Jimmy spent most of our time playing “Vampire: The Masquerade”, a Role-Playing Game set in a modern gothic world of underground hierarchies and ancient powers.  As Storyteller, I had the responsibility of maintaining the other players involved in my story, with the benefit and challenge of immediate responsiveness from my audience, while having to adapt and react to their interactions with the story line.  It would feel as though I was writing a story with a life of its own, and as it progressed, it became more and more interesting, and harder and harder to tell.
            Despite all the hardships I experienced in my first years here, the absolute greatest events of my life have come from opportunities I could have found nowhere else.  In the summer of 1999, I signed up for the Badasht Academy, where hundreds of youth participated in an intensive study of the early history of my religion, the Baha’i Faith.  Although I had been a Baha’i since I was born, I had never been so deeply inspired until I read of the incredible devotion those followers had to the Cause in its early days.  Knowing that some of them were not much older than myself when they devoted everything they had to their spiritual leaders caused me to reexamine my motivations and goals in life.  A year later, I met the most wonderful people during a service project where we traveled to Costa Rica to work with communities in remote areas.  Being in a completely different environment and social setting really changed all of our perspectives, causing us to form bonds that will last for many years because of the experiences we had together.
            Now that I’m in college I have tried to work towards all the goals I set up in the past years.  Storytelling still motivates me as a means, although the ends have changed drastically.  My senior year in “Framingham High School” was a very productive time in terms of my art, and making movies with my friends AJ and Dave shaped my recent decision to go to film school here at Emerson.  What I hope to accomplish, whether I vent my frustrations at a world that is at times dark, or purge my emotions with elevating and inspiring subjects, is to represent the purest of feelings that have emerged from the truest of life stories.

 

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