Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Tassyla Queiroga Sousa e Silva

Davi was a talented young man, raised between piano lessons and drama classes. Coming from a wealthy family, he‘d always been surrounded by art. His father, a diplomat with an impeccable résumé, and his mother, a collector of impressionist paintings, never questioned his vocation. They saw in their son’s abilities the proof of their cultural success.

As an only child, Davi saw the stage as a way to earn his parents’ attention. He tried to stay in line, to deserve the little time they had to spare, always busy as they were. He loved the attention he received every time he stepped on stage, where the spotlight made him feel seen. 

He felt special every time he created abstract sketches and read poetry. To Davi, art wasn’t something to be learned, but something that naturally belonged to him since childhood.

The financial issues remained his parents’ responsibility, even as he reached his thirties. But he made the most of his luck and studied a lot. After reading Baudelaire, he decided to graduate in literature. He started to write, and filled lots of diaries with details of his bourgeois traumas. Some pages smelled of matcha latte, others of existential crisis and parental neglect.

He decided to spend a year in Eastern Europe, on first-class train rides, studying communist theories. He wrote poems in fancy coffee shops and published his short stories in indie magazines. To make the most of the fact that he was rich, he became a “bon vivant”.

With plenty of free time, he spent long afternoons in front of blank canvases that soon turned into an exhibition, thanks to his mother’s support. All his creativity was encouraged, exploited, and made to generate profit.

He published his first book after a trip to Asia. The chaos of those countries was exciting, and provided plenty of material. While other people were struggling with immigration bureaucracy, he was wandering through distant places, observing the way those people seemed more intense, more alive, perhaps because of the hot climate.

He was born in Canada, that cold place where people didn’t touch each other. The first hug he remembers receiving happened in a theater class. He can’t recall ever kissing or being kissed by his parents.

This trip to Asia changed a lot within him, and he decided to explore the world. He wanted to feel a bit of peace, away from the melancholy he tried to fill with artistic success. 

He was trying to get inspired by different people, in order to expand his creative freedom. And so, he studied ceramics and buddhism, took a yoga teacher training, became a bougie hippie, learned to make crafts, and even lived in a motorhome for 3 months. Even though he always called his parents, the family couldn’t say exactly which country he was in.

Davi felt he couldn’t complain about anything. All his problems could be solved with a new plane ticket. And yet, that loneliness and silence followed him everywhere he went. Trying to fill that void, he experienced mushrooms and ayahuasca. The kaleidoscopes he saw while using drugs told him that he needed to go back home.

In the end, he went to live in a neighborhood near his parents’ home in Ontario. He moved to an apartment full of plants, crystals, and boho prints.

Soon he became a professor in the arts department, and he wrote his greatest bestseller: an auto-fiction novel about his courage to travel the world. There, he included lessons about spirituality, exploring concepts of ego, presence, and detachment.

He knew his talent would be recognized, and sure enough, he won a major literary prize. 

He was a good, talented man. He just didn’t know what to do with all that privilege he couldn’t transform into love.