Working Title

My first real summer job was as a waiter at my local ritzy restaurant in the summer after my high school graduation. Leicester has two restaurants: Eller’s and the Castle Restaurant. Eller’s is the place most people go to. The Castle is where Leicester’s fake money goes. I know the Castle and I know it’s not actually this high quality establishment that people proclaim it to be. Its manufactured haughtiness resulted in it being listed on many lists of the top restaurants in New England, but its medieval theme and peculiar emphasis on squash as a side dish would not even vault it into my top fifty. However, I think my main reason for disliking the Castle is that I worked there.

During middle school, when I worked nowhere, the students who sold the most magazines in the school-wide magazine drive would be picked up by a limo outside of the school and driven to a special luncheon at the Castle Restaurant. I won this prize, but forgot to go, and I remember kicking myself for missing out on a luxurious limo ride (it was only through Leicester, it was probably as luxurious as the Castle was fancy what with its Round Table Potatoes, which were just tater tots). Now, though, I never want to step foot in the Castle again.

My boss, Jim, was nice enough, but the head of the wait staff, Jenna, made me apoplectic. Nervous enough going into my first day at the Castle, my self-confidence was systematically destroyed bit by bit with every passing shift of waiting tables at the restaurant. I wasn’t good at waiting tables, that was true enough, but this absence of skill turned into something that Jenna made me feel miserable over.

“Do you have table three?” she asked me once.

“Yes,” I told her, knowing I’d done something wrong.

“You put the dessert spoon on the wrong side of the plate.”

“Okay,” I told her, as I guided the cart of dessert shelves to one of my other tables to introduce them to the cakes and pies and cooked desserts we had on hand. Referencing the list of desserts and their ingredients that I kept in my checkbook, I could see Jenna staring at me from the other side of the restaurant. Once I served the desserts and returned the cart to the kitchen, she pulled me aside again.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. I stared at her. “You’re reading off scrap paper? That’s it. You’re staying after your shift here with me.”

And there I stood in the empty restaurant as she forced me to memorize what comprised every dessert on the menu and recite it back to her. None of this was in the job description, but it was important to her, probably because she really bought into all of those articles in New England-based magazines.

Once the summer came to an end, I left the Castle and never looked back. It had been one of the worst experiences of my life and it consumed my every waking thought throughout the summer; when I wasn’t working, I was dreading going to work. It was extremely toxic and it wrecked every attitude I had towards jobs I took in the two years that followed.

So when the opportunity came for me to apply for the Disney College Program, an experience I’d dreamed of for my entire childhood, I had no way to anticipate that I would feel doubt. This persisted throughout the majority of my experience with the program as I was convinced the entire time that I was bad at my job or that I was disliked by my colleagues. It wasn’t until the program came to an end that I received a flurry of messages from my coworkers who told me how much they were going to miss me. With my program coming to an end, I realized that I had made friends, but I was so terrified of being chewed out or made fun of that I had never taken the chance to actually look around and savor the environment I was in. I loved what I had done, but I’d never realized it until it was over with.

This idea is a cliche that can be found in so many works of art from The Office to Joni Mitchell songs to Gilmore Girls and I couldn’t believe I was actually faced with this issue in person. Uninterested in feeling any of this, my college roommate was my best friend from high school and we lived right down the hall from my other best friend in high school. With the horrible Castle job distracting me from the end of my public school career, I found myself eager for the summer to be over just so my job would be, too. And I never had the chance to reflect on the fact that such a huge part of my life was over. For good.

But when I was sitting in an airport in Orlando, that feeling came at me like a wave. I hadn’t even taken one last look at Cinderella Castle in the Magic Kingdom, my workplace for five months where I was actually valued, but never looked past my own fears to realize this.

I forgot to download my podcasts when I got on the plane, forcing me to venture into my iTunes library and my shuffled playlists eventually resulted in “Sandcastles” by Beyonce. When she crooned about walking away from the sandcastles she built, presumably with Jay-Z, I wished I could experience what it would be like to grow attached to a castle that lacked permanence.

These realizations dawning on me one after another on my flight from Orlando to Boston, I reached out to some of my friends and I was invited to move back for the summer where I could live in an apartment with three people whom I never asked to hang out with outside of work, out of fear that they would say no to me. And there I was living with them.

I extended my program by two months over the summer to live what I’d always dreamed of and I made sure to appreciate every moment because Dustin wasn’t Jenna and Kelly wasn’t Jenna and Jess wasn’t Jenna. Jenna was the past and they were my present and I was desperate to channel my inner dog by living each moment like it was the only thing that mattered.

This only made it harder to be back at UMass this past fall. My entire mindset when I went to Florida was that I could not give myself the potential for regret as I got older. When real obligations and responsibilities set in, I can’t just up and leave to Florida to work and live at Disney World with all of my friends. But this feeling didn’t end when I left Florida; it only grew.

And now, I’m waiting for an email from the University of Central Florida that will tell me my transfer application was accepted. When my friends end their programs with Disney, they’ll be scattered back around the globe. Australia, Scotland, Mexico, China. And tips from the Castle Restaurant aren’t enough to visit them there every day like I used to. I have to take the chance to be with them now, or else I might regret it.

And then I would graduate from the University of Central Florida and they’d be scattered anyway. So I would try to go back to them and I would try and I would try and I would try.

And it would never be enough and I don’t know how to reconcile that.

The truth is, I really doubt I’m going to the University of Central Florida. The feeling I get in that state is unrivaled joy (surely most people in Florida don’t experience that) and I can’t help but feel like I’m always going to be chasing that. But I can’t afford it and I can’t justify it and I can’t feel good about it when my friends in Amherst and in Leicester think me stupid for even applying to UCF in the first place.

The truth is, this entire semester has been one big distraction as I grapple to find out what this whole program meant to me. It was wholly transformative and I’ve devoted every day of the fall semester to trying to understand it and reflect on it and still, I’m lost.

When we had to take a half piece of paper out of our notebooks on Friday, I answered the questions pretty straightforwardly.

“Who do you write for?”

“The kid sitting next to me.”

“What places do you think of when you turn to the page?”

“I think of places that feel familiar.”

Until: “What emotions is your writing still baffled by?”

An explosion of capital letters. “MY WRITING IS BAFFLED BY LOSS AND MOVING ON PAST LOSS!!!” I continue, “It is the nut I want to crack. My writing is also baffled by love, but I am less concerned with this at the moment. Personally, I am baffled by the same. How do I move on? How do I know that I love? That I am loved?”

And now I don’t even think this piece is that good. Is it meant to be an essay? A narrative? Or am I just going to write and write and write in the hopes that I’ll come to some sort of logical conclusion about where I’m at in my life right now? Does that count as a piece of writing? Does that have value? How could I even begin to worry about whether or not my writing “counts” when I have so many more important questions to answer.

The one hundred and ninety-two days I spent in Orlando are the ones where I genuinely feel like they will always be the best of my life. And now I feel like any attempt to go back to Orlando is just some desperate attempt to reclaim these glory days, akin to showing up to every high school football game after my graduation in a letterman’s jacket. (Do they still have letterman’s jackets or is this impression stemming from a vague knowledge of the plots of Laverne and Shirley episodes?)

It’s different when the closest friends I’ve ever made live in Florida. They gave me a place to stay and they gave me love I’d never felt from friendships before. But everyone is at such a different point in their lives (one has gotten engaged!) now that I feel like I won’t fit into the puzzle anymore after being gone for the past four months. Have they moved on? How could I reconcile it if they did move on? I don’t want to be forgotten.

I went to Orlando over my Thanksgiving break, with the largest intention being an examination of whether or not UCF would be a sensible option for me to pursue. Could I afford it? What’s the campus like? Can I get around okay with Lyfts?

My UCF questions were sidelined when I found out that the people who told me I always had a place to stay in their apartment revealed that they had given up their lease and were not sure if they would be looking for a new place to stay once April rolled around. They also considered the fact that they might be heading back to their hometowns. One of the couples that lived there had broken up. Another one was running out of money. I slept on the couch for five days in Florida with my girlfriend, but I couldn’t help but feel like it might be the last time for something like that.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t fit into their plans anymore. Didn’t they realize that these had been the best months of their lives? Why were they so willing to move on?

Why was I being so controlling? I hate myself for thinking any of these things. I’ve been gone for months and I can’t expect them to wait for me forever, especially when they’ve already done so much for me. I know if it came down to it, I would encourage my friends to do what’s best for them because I have to put their lives ahead of my own emotions, but it doesn’t always come easy.

Transitioning out of high school very easily and gradually losing friends throughout my time in Leicester in amicable ways allowed me for a great many years of experienced minimal loss, but now when I’m faced with the prospects of actually having to move on, I have no idea what to do with those feelings.

Where can I put these feelings? I tried to put them into a transfer application, but it’ll never truly come to fruition, not really. And I don’t know how to work through them.

My friends are upset for me even thinking of leaving to Florida.

My friends in Florida don’t have the heart to tell me they won’t be where they’ll be this time next year.

My parents told me UMass was the smart play.

My girlfriend told me UCF was the smart play.

My uncle, who has always provided my favorite advice, told me he can’t give me any because he doesn’t know what Florida has done for me.

And I don’t either. I know it’s transformative. I know it’s pivotal. But I don’t know how that exists in my life anymore. I don’t know where I fit into my own mind’s hurried equation solving goals anymore.

I used to know that my obsession and fanaticism with all things Disney was the “interest” part of my personhood and it wasn’t a part of my personality. But when you work there and live there and find yourself there, how can Disney not be a part of your personality? (And this is without even getting into the idea that Disney is a fucked up company, just like the rest of them, which is an understanding I had to come to throughout my knowledge of corporations and how they operate.) Now, I don’t know where my past ends and my future begins and I’m abandoning all the core tenets of a dog, just like that. I tried so desperately to live in the moment when sipping a frozen apple juice with my best friends behind a replication of Belle’s castle from Beauty and the Beast. 

I can’t get past it. I don’t know if I’m supposed to get past it, but I know that, either way, I can’t. And it’s hard to get past it when you feel like you’re in relationships with an iPhone.

I follow Disney World news accounts on Twitter and podcasts that let me know every change that happens to the park, even if it’s just a sign that moved two inches to the right.

I feel the need to comment “Jealous!” on all the pictures my friends share on social media when they still get to pose in front of Cinderella Castle.

I listen to the music I used to hear at night when I worked in the park while I walk to my dorm from the library and I pretend I’m in my favorite place.

I can’t fucking get any of it out of my head and I’m not even sure if it’s Disney that does it. I went to Disney World almost every year as a kid because I had family members who lived in Orlando and would help us drastically cut down on hotel and food costs. And yes, I love it, but my nostalgia and post-Disney sadness would fade after two or three weeks. What has kept this drum of fraught emotions beating for the past year has been the people.

I don’t miss coming out of the airport on my first day and waiting for my ride. I miss my cousin Jason being the one who picked me up.

I don’t miss the grainy floors and steep steps that led into my apartment, which never actually had doors that locked. I miss hearing the voices of my friends I had the privilege of living with.

I don’t miss scooping popcorn for angry guests for twelve hours. I miss the thrill of getting to a popcorn wagon and seeing one of my favorite coworkers there waiting to work with me.

I don’t miss the Haunted Mansion. I miss riding it with my loved ones. (Okay, maybe I miss the Haunted Mansion a little bit.)

It’s just hard when you finally know that you’ve met your people. After years of being the only one in a friend group who would actually try to make plans with everyone as a group and telling them how much you loved your friends only to be met with remarks that made fun of me for daring to tell people I loved them when I had the chance, it was a welcome feeling to have people who would cry on your shoulder in front of the Polynesian Hotel and tell you that you were their best friend they’ve ever had, even though they’re traveling thousands of miles away to a different continent and it’s been nine months and you still haven’t seen them and it kills you every day. And the time difference kills you, too, when they’re getting emergency surgery in an Australian hospital so you stay up all night waiting to hear the results and your Latin professor remarks about the bags under your eyes.

There’s nothing to say beyond the fact that I met my people. The people who accept my love. The people who accept me as I am. But now those people are moving on and I don’t know how to and maybe they’re scared, too, and oh, should I just call them? But clearly I’d have no idea what to say and I don’t want to be the burden Jenna told me I was and I don’t want to be an annoyance or an obligation. I’m on good terms with everyone and what if I say something dumb and then they don’t like me anymore? I know these worries are all entirely unfounded because, like I said, they’re my people. The shared interest of Disney sparked an aspect in our personalities that surely made us more susceptible to love and vocalizing our feelings. We were adults, not yet fully realized, but people all the same and we each had our backgrounds and our shortcomings and we went through everything together so, of course we all loved each other.

This whole pieces feels like lunacy. I’m sorry if this is not what we’re supposed to do, but it’s everything that came flooding out of me when I heard the question in class yesterday that baffled me, even though it was about the idea of baffling in and of itself. And now this probably feels like a lazy stream of consciousness, but I promise I’m really trying to work through something here.

And it’s been two pages and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not really any closer to writing about loss than when I began this behemoth hours ago. After all, I spent the entirety of National Novel Writing Month’s fifty thousand words trying to tackle the same question and I got about just as far as understanding what the hell my life means now.

I’m sure most people do their internships or they study abroad and they move on with their lives and let that just be an experience that guided them in the past. But I can’t do that apparently. I really do want to go back, but I feel like I really can’t. Maybe I’m too nostalgic or too sentimental or I attach too much meaning to things. Maybe that’s it. I just have faulty mental wiring and I’m not capable of letting things be what they are without making them reshape my heart.

I feel like I need one of those mentor figures. Like I need Sean Maguire or Dumbledore or someone to come down and guide me through my mental maze. Or maybe I need to stop keeping everything bottled up within me until I spill it out over an assignment like this. Is this writing even creative or am I just verbally dying?

It was the best time of my life with the best people of my life. Surely anyone would want to go back to that? But life just gets in the way. I have to get my teaching license. I have to graduate. I have to do all these things because society says so and society does not say that it would make any sense to live in a place where pretzels cost seven dollars. Is this how Rory felt when she left Star’s Hollow for Yale?

 

Every night at the Magic Kingdom, I felt so lucky that I got to work outdoors because of the nightly fireworks show, Happily Ever After. It is a twenty-two minute nighttime extravaganza of fireworks and lasers and sparklers and projections on Cinderella Castle (this is the castle I look at every time I have the chance to, unlike the Castle Restaurant where I shield my eyes whenever I drive by it) and a Disney medley that consists of songs about the themes of journeys and following your dreams and making a wish and oh my gosh, why couldn’t just one song be about what it means to move on?

Instead the song that resonates with me the most comes in the grand finale when “Go the Distance” from Hercules plays and the lyrics sing, “I have often dreamed of a far off place where a great, warm welcome will be waiting for me. And the crowds will cheer when they see my face and a voice keeps saying this is where I’m meant to be?”

Fuck, man, I can’t even type those words without chills on my arms and tears in my eyes. That far off place is where I’m meant to be and I can’t move on from it and I can’t go back to it so what the hell am I supposed to do with it? Maybe twelve more pages would help.