The Dreamers

The beginning of a short story that I have yet to finish. Inspired by how much I feel like I identified with the characters in Up.

We spent our whole lives trying to decide what to do with them. We were dreamers in the truest sense of the word. Dreamers, like writers write, like singers sing. Dedicated, enthusiastically, passionately. We did other things, of course, like work and go to work-related functions, eat dinner on our balcony, criticize the movies we watched on the weekends and the music we listened to on the radio. But, we never once stopped dreaming.

We dreamt on the side, like a bartender with a theatre degree. Moonlighting, like it was what we were meant to do. Dreaming of dreaming while we sat at our day job desks, while we sat on the subway on the way to our day jobs, while we sat on the couch after a long day at work. If we could have somehow been paid to do it, we would have been millionaires. Then, of course, we would have actually been able to live out those dreams, rather than hopelessly spending our lives chasing them.

I was an HR co-ordinator at a job placement centre when I met Gary in 2006. He was an IT consultant at the marketing company on the floor above mine in the tall, mediocrity-coloured office building where we both worked. We met at an interoffice mixer, where all employees, in their semi-formal office attire that could only be worn at specifically this type of event, drank boxed wine and mingled. Gary and I found common ground within our affinity for adventure. We both had chosen to work in such labour (opposite of intensive) fields because we knew adventure would come calling at anytime, and we needed our nights and weekends off to mentally prepare ourselves for the possibilities.

We started to fall in love over our regular walks in Central Park, where the clouds seemed to know what we were thinking and shifted into the products of our thoughts before we had a chance to voice them. Gondolas, safari trucks, 6-star Parisian hotels. We spent our romantic dinners cooing about the littler restaurant we would open in Paris, where open mic nights would be hosted twice a week and the artwork of a local painter would be exhibited each month. Even during our love-making sessions, we dreamt. We talked dirty to each other, between all of the grunts and moans and polyester sheets, about the nasty little things we’d do next time, with rope and lube and superhero costumes.

It wasn’t in our plans to marry. We would bypass the ceremony and reception, heading straight for the airport and our honeymoon. We saved up all of our money to go hiking through the Amazon. But, being the only child of a lovelorn marriage, I allowed my mother to moan her way into the front pew of the church at my inconveniencing wedding ceremony, watching me reluctantly vow to be loyal and true in front of 430 more guests than we initially planned to invite. Our Amazon fund was drained. Gary’s parents bought us a 7-day getaway package to adventurous, exciting Niagara Falls, which we sold on eBay to the highest bidding patron for $568. The 427 toasters we received were much more difficult to turn over, so we spent our honeymoon week, instead, cruising Craigslist for new, better paying jobs so we could build our dream fund even faster.

Gary was the first to find a new job. He became head IT analyst at a leading pharmaceutical company. Within two months, we had half of our fund back, and we were booking a flight to Brazil. Little did we know that an economic crisis was brewing beneath our floorboards as we Samba’d in our little kitchen. Within a week, a global recession had caught the world by storm, sending a chill down the spine of Drug Co.’s president, straight down to his a*s, where the lips of his newest employee, Gary Johanssen, were firmly placed.

Because I remained in my low-paying, survival-geared job, my money was tied up, paying for rent while Gary’s savings slowly dwindled, paying for gas to get and from dozens of interviews each month. Our fund struggled, fought back and tried to resist facing it’s inevitable fate of becoming depleted, but in the end, we were back where we started at the interoffice mixer four years prior...