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Dream meets George when he’s at his lowest, and when he’s unsure what he’s going to do with his future.
He had fulfilled all of his family’s wishes for him: he went to church every Sunday. He helped his mom out with his siblings, and could be viewed as the ideal big brother. He played football on his high school’s team, and his parents always dreamed of him going to college and continuing that there. They had high hopes for his future as a professional athlete, and he did, too.
But then, he graduated high school. And he found that he didn’t want to go to college.
Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel sure of anything. He didn’t have words for this feeling he was experiencing for the first time in his life, but suddenly imagining what his future would look like made him feel empty. In the darkest of moments, he wasn’t sure that he would even have a future ahead of him.
Because he no longer felt passionate about the things he used to. Everything that used to bring him joy felt dull and dreary. And it was a terrifying thing to face on his own, let alone confide in his parents about. Because to top it all off, the whole “deciding not to go to college” thing was making his mother side-eye him with looks full of disappointment and concern every time he left his room in that summer immediately after graduation.
And then one day, when his mother had finally gotten tired of his woefulness and sent him to the basement to do some chores, he saw their family’s piano sitting dust-covered in the back corner. And from that moment, even if just a little bit, things began to change.
Growing up, he had always been involved in music. It was something he did on the side, something that he enjoyed but always thought wasn’t realistic as a future career. He fondly remembered weekends spent sitting at his family’s piano, tapping at slightly out-of-tune keys and internalizing the noise that each of them made to later begin to form songs of his own. As he slowly improved, his mother was excited and presented him before their pastor to play songs at church like he was a gift from God himself. He even began singing a little bit, and he found himself enjoying it a lot.
But as he grew older and life got a little bit more hectic in the time where he was still actively planning out his future, the piano had become dust-covered and music had become a distant memory more than anything.
But on that late-summer day, he sat down at the piano in their basement. He brushed his hands gently across the keys, trying to remove as much of the dust as he could without a cloth. And then, with only a little hesitation, he began tapping out notes in an almost child-like wonder in the same way he had as a kid.
It was the beginning of a new passion. It felt euphoric—it was the first time in months that anything had brought him joy. And for the first time, he was taking those notes and forming them into songs of his own.
Creating music became an outlet. He spent most of his days locked away in his family’s basement, putting music to the angst-filled words he spent most of his sleepless nights scribbling onto worn notebook pages. His mother’s eyes were still filled with disappointment every time she would watch him stumble down the stairs to their basement, but she also seemed relieved that he was doing something beyond staring at the wall in his room and wasting away.
And then one day, he decided to record himself singing and playing the piano into the shitty microphone of his phone. And suddenly he realized that the only thing he could see himself doing in the future was playing music.
It was both a scary and reassuring thought. Growing up, he’d been conditioned to think that creating art was meant to be nothing more than a hobby on the side of a professional career. Making it big in any art field was nothing but an unachievable pipe dream, and he knew his mother would disapprove. But at the same time, he suddenly had a future in mind. Having any future at all had become a thought that his brain didn’t welcome, and now here he was with even a single plan for the future in mind.
So he decided: fuck it.
As expected, this was to his mother’s horror. He knows it comes from a place of concern for him and his having a secure future, but it comes across as disapproval and disappointment toward him telling her that he wants to pursue music as a career. She tells him that he needs to either get a job or get out if those are his plans, and he thinks he gets the lesson she’s trying to teach him. He understands, so he leaves and couch surfs between friends’ houses for a while.
In the meantime, he works on music from his shitty laptop and keyboard he hooks up to it that he bought at a garage sale. It’s not ideal, but it still feels like a step in the right direction. It feels like proving a point, even if it means sitting on his friends’ couches at 2am with a keyboard and laptop balanced precariously in front of him, headphones in his ears as he creates what he’s passionate about. It helps to drown out the fact that he’s unsure where he’ll be sleeping a week from now.
He can only play the piano, but online music software helps him with this. He learns to add in sounds digitally, and thinks his music is starting to sound more polished. Hesitantly, he even begins posting some of it to YouTube, and suddenly he has a few regular commenters who say they adore his sound, his lyrics, and can’t wait to hear how it develops.
It’s through this that some local people with connections begin reaching out, and suddenly he’s being offered small opportunities to play at bars and clubs. It isn’t huge, and he’ll be paid very little, if any money at all, for these shows. But it’s still a step, and he cherishes it so fucking much.
To play live music, he knows he needs more than just himself. So for the time being, he recruits two of his friends who casually played in marching band in high school to take up playing some instruments for him at live shows.
To them, music isn’t a passion. It’s a side hobby that they enjoy enough, but mostly indulge Dream in only because he asks and because they’re students at the local community college who could use a little spare cash on occasion.
So life moves forward, and his dream starts to look a little bit more realistic. He’s getting a little more attention, and has posted more and more of the music he keeps making in his free time. He’s finally moved in with one of his bandmates, and things feel slightly more secure than they had before.
And then, when it starts to feel like he could get his big break any day now, his bandmates just have to remind him that this isn’t their dream; it’s his. And they do just that by leaving the band with apologetic explanations about how this is getting too serious, and it isn’t what they imagined their futures looking like. Dream wants music, but they want stable careers and a white picket fence in front of a big, stereotypical suburban house that’s filled with the screams and laughter of kids.
He feels hopeless. But one thing they actually do manage to do for him in their departure is mention the name of some local drummer they know.
His name is George. Dream remembers meeting him briefly at one of their shows, and recalls feeling mesmerized by his soft, pretty features and entrancing accent. He remembers, too, how he had shoved the butterflies in his stomach deep down into the recesses of his brain to be dealt with at a later date.
So with a phone number scribbled sloppily onto a piece of paper in hand, Dream makes a phone call in an attempt to keep his hopes alive. It won’t be until much later that he realizes this single phone call is what would change the trajectory of his entire life.
*
He meets George for the second time on a normal weeknight they had arranged for Dream to stop by and see him play the drums.
And, to Dream’s shock, he’s really good. It’s just an added bonus that he looks hot doing it, too. But that’s unprofessional to think about your newly minted bandmate, so he shoves it deep into his mind alongside those same butterflies from their first meeting.
After he’s done, he invites Dream to stay awhile in his small, shitty apartment. So Dream agrees, and before he knows it, him and George have done nothing but talk hours into the night.
George moved to the US as an international student. George began playing the drums in secondary school, and found that it was something he adored and was passionate about. George was recently graduated from college, and had a fancy paid internship at some local office that he got using his computer science degree.
But George didn’t like his internship. He explained that he enjoyed computer science a lot, and took joy in coding things like video games for his own enjoyment. But the internship was to secure his future career path, and he had only taken it for that reason and so he could afford his apartment.
He was opposite of Dream in a lot of ways. He was extremely intelligent, and had the means to secure a solid future in front of him. When he first began explaining what he did for a living, Dream couldn’t help but feel inferior.
But where they diverged, it seemed, was in their love for music.
Because when George asked Dream about what he was doing with his life, he didn’t condescend to him at all. He simply nodded along as he listened to Dream ramble about how he wanted music more than he had wanted anything else in his life. About how he had no plan B, and wasn’t sure what he was going to do if this didn’t work out.
And then, George agreed: that his ideal future would be one where he plays music, and not one where he’s sitting at a desk all day in uncomfortably pressed slacks and stiff dress shirts.
As George continued on, Dream got what he meant. To himself, he thought that George was an enigma that was meant to fill a stage with his presence. It was hard to imagine him stuck in an office, undiscovered by anyone but the glazed-over eyes of coworkers just trying to make it to the end of the workday. It wasn’t where he was meant to be. Distantly, Dream wanted to give him the future that he kept talking about with so much hope in his voice.
They spent hours indulging themselves and each other on their pipe dreams. As they talked and talked, their voices becoming hoarse and the thoughts escaping becoming less coherent, Dream was beginning to be able to picture a future where their dreams were a reality. He could vividly imagine a future where they were musicians, and had made it together.
He felt like he had known George for his entire life after those few hours. In those few hours, he had become convinced of their dreams being sure. Their imagined future would come true, he was sure of it. He would do it with George by his side.
At times, as they began playing shows together, he became a little less sure. Their very first show was a bit clunky and disorganized, but he still had lingering hope. And at the end of each show at shitty dive bars or college parties, the crowd slowly growing by a few people every time they played, George would look at him with a glowing smile that lit up an entire room and eyes that quite literally sparkled with the joy of playing music, and suddenly it would feel like everything was going to be okay as long as he could keep gravitating around George like a planet does the sun.
One night, a few months in, they were scheduled to play the biggest show of their careers. One of his connections locally had whispered to him that apparently, rumor had it that some record execs had heard about what was going on with these two guys playing music in Orlando and wanted to hear it for themselves. The show was at a small local venue that held a few hundred people instead of at bars, clubs, and in people’s basements the way shows had been before.
Dream was nervous. And then, it only got worse when George came to him and explained that his office had planned some mandatory event that all employees were required to attend. He swore he would find a way to get out of it, and that there was no way he was missing the show.
But then the day before the show came around, and George still hadn’t managed to convince his boss that he had a good enough reason to get out of attending. And suddenly it was the night of the show, and Dream was sitting alone backstage under a dingy, water-stained ceiling feeling like he was going to throw up. Because he suddenly didn’t know how he would ever be able to do this without George. Months spent doing this by his side had made him unable to do it alone. It felt like he couldn’t remember a time when he was on his own for this, and that thought was terrifying.
But as his anxious thoughts continued to flow through his brain, making his skin feel like it was going to vibrate off of his bones, the door was opening. And suddenly George was standing there in all his glory, his presence filling the entire room with light in the way it always did for Dream.
He was in his typical performing clothes, too much skin on display for Dream to want to look away. Most notably, though, is that he wasn’t at his office’s mandatory event.
And when Dream asks him about it, he simply shrugs, and says one sentence like it’s no big deal: “I quit.”
And in that moment, Dream lets the thought that he loves him come to the forefront of his mind without pushing it away.
Because in the months he had known George, he wasn’t big on using words to express the things he loved and cared about. But Dream did always wake up on George’s couch with a blanket covering him and his notebook and laptop safely shut on George’s scratched and beaten coffee table on the nights when he would fall asleep writing. And he did drop everything to quietly listen and offer distractions when Dream would call him late at night with a shaking voice in the wake of anxiety and panic attacks that came with thinking of the future for too long. And here he was, quitting his job to play a single show with Dream as part of their plan for the future that was ultimately a big what-if.
George had a set future ahead of him, but here he was taking the biggest chance of his life on some guy he had only known for a few months that had no plans other than the one that was least likely to work out. And in a selfish way, Dream was glad.
Filled with giddy wonder, Dream begins warming up with him to play the show. It’s like George can see the change in him in the way he keeps sending soft glances and grins in Dream’s direction as he hums verses and taps at his keyboard.
That night, Dream likes to believe they played the best show they had so far. A passion and surety had filled him unlike any other before. It felt like he had tore himself open and was gushing his insides out onto the stage through his hands beating into the keys of his piano and his voice escaping his throat.
And George was by his side through it all. Whenever anxiety began to rise as he looked out at the crowd that was so much bigger than any they had played in front of before, he could glance across the stage and make eye contact with George at his drum set, who was always already looking.
At the end of the show, when he’s holding George’s hand in his own and bowing before the screaming crowd, he feels the most sure of their future than he ever had before now.
Backstage, George doesn’t even flinch when Dream presses their disgustingly sweaty bodies close together, hugging him like his life depends on it. He only giggles in Dream’s arms, and Dream thinks he maybe even presses a light kiss to where his face rests between Dream’s shoulder and neck.
In their embrace is stored his inherent belief that everything will work out with George by his side.
This proves to be true when, a couple days later, George is beside him and clutching his hand tightly as they read over all the emails they had received from huge record labels, both in awe of so many people wanting to support their dreams.
George kisses him for the first time a few weeks later when they leave their new record label’s office, and Dream is sure it’s before the ink of their signatures has even dried on the dotted line.