I'm Bad At Naming Things

You don’t remember if you woke up with this idea in your head one morning, or if you were making small talk one day with someone who loved to travel and you spontaneously volunteered this desire to show that you were a stakeholder in the conversation,but it became part of who you are all the same. You started researching the idea one night to escape a particularly trying week, and with a few taps of your phone, found a place that made your eyes go wide. Crystalline water in beautiful pools, palm trees, cloudless skies...once the image of you sitting deckside in a chair with your feet up and a mai tai in hand entered your mind, it refused to leave. The price made you wince, but, with a little math, some life adjustments, and some patience, you could do it. Besides, you think to yourself, you’ve never done a budget. It might be fun.

You work in an office that you like more than you don’t, and--more importantly for our purposes here--pays enough that you can save money. You run the numbers, and come up with a savings plan (you almost buy a whiteboard to track your progress, but, in the spirit of the goal, use a free app instead. Two weeks later, you grudgingly by the upgraded version for $1.99 that you take from your coffee fund). The plan isn’t glamorous; in fact, it’s staying in several times a month when you’d rather go out, putting a hard cap on discretionary spending when you do, and cooking on the nights you’d rather just order takeout and be done. As a reward for reaching one of your first saving milestones, you have the picture of the resort’s view printed and buy a cheap frame to hang in your office and at home. You never tell anyone, but you name it “Eyes on the prize.”

It’s not always smooth sailing, of course. At one point, you need a root canal, at another, it’s a car repair. The pay raise at work isn’t quite what the company told everyone it would be this year. The shoes you got on sale never fit quite right. The budgeting app, which is plant themed for some reason, reminds you of the times you go over budget with a push notification and a bare tree, a more striking image that the blossoming one that greets you when you save more than you planned. But still, but still: mai tai. Breeze. Sun. Eyes on the prize.

One day, during an interminable stretch in your life, the app sends a new image: a bright sun with fully blooming trees and flowers that announce, “You Did It!!” The news elates you while you eat cold cereal with brown sugar for breakfast, and you reserve the trip early that morning. You have the same “It’s finally happening, huh?” conversation several times at work that week. You’re thrilled, or at least that’s what you tell people. Maybe it hasn’t quite sank in yet. It will once it gets closer.

The trip gets steadily closer until one morning, it arrives. You go to the airport for as agreeable an airport stint as anyone can have, board the plan, half watch a movie you opted to not see in theaters while saving, and arrive. The first day takes some getting used to: the weather’s nice, but a tad listless, and there are more kids here than you like. No matter, tomorrow will be the day. The mai tai. The breeze. The sun. The prize.

You wake up in the morning without setting any alarms. After sleeping in as much as you can, you do an okay breakfast, and settle on doing a crossword after a noble attempt at sudoku (who even does sudoku?) because you want to pass a little of the day before claiming the prize on the deck. Well, okay, maybe you’re still feeling a little logy, it can wait until after lunch. Wait, let’s do lunch, then let lunch settle, and then go.

Okay, this is it. No more waiting. If you wait any longer, it’ll be too late in the day and you’ll have to do this tomorrow and you won’t be able to properly relax. So you go to the deck. There aren’t a lot of people, but everyone there is situated juuuuust so without enough space between them to comfortably make your own. You lounge at the bar with a beer waiting for them to leave. The mai tai will wait unt--oh shit, the family with the sullen teen left, go go go! Order the drink!

Finally. You sit on the deck, looking out at the pool, set your mai tai down, put your feet up, and sigh. You soak in your moment. But only, you notice that the drink is a little watery, there’s a cloud or two that keep getting in the way of the sun, and there’s no breeze. You can see where the pool needs a cleaning. You hear a pop song that’s too old to be recent but too young to be appreciated. It just sounds stale. And you realize you can’t get comfortable in this chair. Idly, you wonder how much longer you have to sit here to make it worth it. A part of you wonders if it ever will be.