Dream By Numbers, by Jenny Bahn

I once had a dream.  I once had many dreams.  Not while I slept but while I woke.  These were dreams for the Grown Up Me.  I was a small child looking into the future and imagining a life for herself based on the girl she was then and not the woman she would be.  I could be anything then because I was nothing at all.

One:

In the first grade we took a trip to the Museum of Natural History.  I remember a blue sky, dry brush and cacti, adobe buildings and children my size.  My California youth.  Along a tiered hillside were staged archaeological dig sites, outlined with low wooden fences and taut white twine.  Tools lay strewn atop a smooth and dusty surface.  Bones longed to climb out of the earth.  It was discovery in process.

Inside a building, remnants of past civilizations stood trapped in glass cages.  People, animals, artifacts.  All crumbling, chipped, faded.  Shadows of things that used to be.  Tiny things, broken things, hidden things.  I wanted to discover it all for myself.  At the age of six, I resolved to be an archaeologist.

Later someone told me that new sites were few and far between and that remarkable discoveries now came about less often.

Two:

We used to have a playhouse in our backyard.  It was made of plywood and was painted the same colors as the real house it sat behind: Snickerdoodle walls with a deep olive trim.  The same brown composite shingles covered both roofs; the playhouse’s taken from our garage with the broken door and the hanging bicycles.

Inside my playhouse was a Fischer Price picnic table, the colors blue and yellow and red.  In the corner were cabinets in which I stored my plastic food.  Fake pies and hamburgers.  Lettuce that never wilted and cheese that never bent.  There was a tall wooden box painted to look like a stove, the burners rendered in two-dimensional black.  I made menus.  Sometimes I could convince someone to order, a task made difficult by my freshly learned cursive handwriting.  Sometimes I would just pretend, bustling around the small space by myself, serving fake food to no one.

In real life, I made cookies from scratch.  People licked their fingers afterward.  I was good.  I thought about opening a bakery or a coffee shop or something that involved real menus and real people.

But then people told me how hard it is to start your own business and that bakers wake up at 4 a.m.

Three:

I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, but I was far too tall.

I wanted to be in a band, but I didn’t play an instrument.

I wanted aimlessly, hopelessly, tirelessly.

Four:

In high school, the pressure to get good grades and get into a good school obliterated my sense of passion about anything genuine.  Dreams were traded for income-earning realities.  We were all children who turned into adolescents that were told we needed to think of how our natural skill-set could help us get a real job.  With that job we could then buy a house, get married, have a kid.  None of these were dreams for me, but this was how it went.  There were no shortcuts.  Travel was reserved for those twilight years after you put your children through college and paid down your mortgage.  You worked hard and saved money.  You didn’t dig around in dirt for dinosaur bones.  You didn’t bake cupcakes.

I thought about going into public relations.  I contemplated advertising, but only because I loved the ads in fashion magazines.  Eventually, I decided I’d be the editor of a magazine.

Five:

In my late teens, I sat in college classrooms, learning about the history of mass communication, reading about things I don’t remember now, highlighting and typing notes.  I was “learning.”  I did well.  Still, there was no dream.

Six:

I dropped out of “real” school and enrolled in community college.  I started to pursue my mother’s dream for me because my own plans didn’t work out: business school.  “The world revolves around business,” she told me.  It didn’t matter that I hated math or that I was not interested in accounting or finance or anything the world apparently revolved around.  Business would buy me a house and pay for my children and contribute to a 401k.

My dreams were dead, but I didn’t much mind.  I didn’t really think about dreams anymore.  I thought about money.

Seven:

I met an agent and she told me I should model.  So I started.  I went to castings and heard a lot of people say no.  Still, it revived in me some sense of exciting possibility – a new challenge, territory unknown and uncharted.

Jobs came in and I started working.  Life still had a lot of “No” but there was enough “Yes” that I kept at it.

I tried to travel to Europe because that’s what the real models did.  But no one there wanted me.  I yearned to book big jobs, but clients seemed to like other girls more.  When at a meeting with one of my bookers, he said to me, “It’s not like you’re going to book Prada.  After all, you’re no spring chicken.”  I was twenty.  I was twenty and I wanted Prada, even if it didn’t want me.

Eight:

Someone told me I should be an actress.  It was when I was still working in a restaurant, modeling, and taking business classes.  The Possibility of Life instilled a charming and likeable quality in me.  I was not yet beaten down, but unknowingly stood at the foothill of an eroding mountain.  We sat at the hostess desk together, both in our black uniforms and our hair arranged neatly.  “You think?” I asked.  She nodded her head enthusiastically.

Her dream for me was so tempting that I adopted it for myself.  I was special, I thought.  People liked me.  I started to take acting classes.  For three years I took acting classes.  I went on auditions for horror films that I found on my own.  The scripts were terrible and the film quality poor.  The sub-industry of the industry, none of us with the equipment to achieve our goals beautifully or with grace.  Our success was destined to be an act of random chance or dumb luck.  Los Angeles is a city of hopeless dreamers; I counted myself as one of the flock.

I needed an acting agent, but no one wanted me.  I did what they told me to do in my acting classes.  I sent around my headshots with a falsified resume to small agencies – agencies with names you wouldn’t recognize and in buildings on the desolate stretches of Cahuenga.  I made a website with clips of me from small projects.  No one responded.  For three years, no one responded.

I kept modeling.  Money was the salve for the ego wound.  I did jobs I didn’t like.  I was one of many girls doing the same things.  We were the filler girls.  Nameless girls.  The girls who really sold clothing to the masses.  Bodies to drape fabric over.  We were not glamorous.  We did not date rock stars.  We made money.  That was all.

My childish and vain dream of becoming a supermodel had died out long before.  Each subsequent year that I stayed in Los Angeles, doing the same jobs for the same clients killed me a little bit.  I became bitter and mean.  I didn’t like talking to the other girls, especially the ones who were still excited about the Possibility of Life.  Don’t you know? Don’t you know this isn’t going to go anywhere for you?  Don’t you know that you’re going to end up just like me?

This is a spirit dying.

Nine:

In 2009, I was lost.  Money went away.  Jobs were cut in half.  The recession stripped our industry of the only thing it was good for: an inflated income.  There was nothing redeeming about working a job that made you fixate on the fat on the back of your arms if you weren’t being paid well for it.  I no longer looked at the income I earned from the job as fair and honest wages, but as compensation for pain and suffering.

I started to write.

Every day I wrote.  I wrote about my shoes, I wrote about my jobs, I wrote about airplanes.  I wrote about my past because it seemed like the only thing I had left.  I documented the shadows of me, cracked and broken.  I made the hard things seem funny with words.  I smoothed over tragedy with thematic overlays, trying to make my life make sense over the course of an essay.

I kept writing because it killed the time between hating myself and the frustration of living in a world where no one wanted to give me what I wanted.

Ten:

All of a sudden, people started to read.  I started to dream again.  Big dreams.  Dreams with roots that branched out and grew into even bigger dreams.  It was the first time I saw clearly what my dreams meant if they came true.  I saw the consequences of this hope and what I needed to achieve it.  I was exhilarated and terrified.  Because dreams give you something to lose.

I can only hope that this time, this dream comes true.  That my efforts amount to something greater than more wasted time.  I wish for dreams to be real, for my dreams to materialize.  I don’t want to live my life from dream to dream, each abandoned hope eventually evolving into another forgotten piece of myself, sitting in a glass cage somewhere, waiting for the day that I find it again, an old lady chastising the foolhardy dreams of a little girl.

Past work on FlipCollective.com.
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