I am at the bakery I worked at in Central Florida during my late teens. The setting is the same—a small, rustic-looking shop with wooden floors and counters and metal baking racks for displaying freshly baked loaves of bread. The walls are pale yellow, a part of the ambiance I helped create one night after the bakery had closed and a painting party ensued. The staff shift between old and familiar to new and unknown, except for the owners, who are always there in some form. Most often they aren't physically present but they are the reason I'm there, to talk to them, to receive affirmation from them. And it never happens by the time I wake up.
Two brothers, probably in their early 30s, owned the bakery and worked there every day alongside all the staff, and I'd become fond of and close to them. They were cool, but they were also real adults, so I looked up to them (in fact, I was so heavily influenced by them that I voted for Bush in my very first election, something I'll always judge myself for).
In the dream I've come to work a shift, to help out, and I've usually driven all the way from Tampa just to work this shift. But in every dream, I don't know how to use the cash register anymore; either I don't remember how to use it or it's a new system that I haven't been trained on. I also don't have the correct attire—the cream-colored t-shirt, hat, and apron with the circular logo made of wheat shafts. I'm aware of certain real-life circumstances—I am my real age, I live in Tampa, I have a full-time job. These facts are relevant in the dream because they limit the amount of time I can stay to work; I feel pressure to do a good job, fear because I don't know how to do it anymore, and guilt because I might never make amends for the way I left, which seems to be the reason I'm there. Like a lifetime sentence of community service, but for this one very specific community I had wronged. These are the basic circumstances of every dream.
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| Donning the proper t-shirt after coming home from a shift at the bakery. May 1999. |
After I graduated high school, I started college at the University of Central Florida in the fall of 1999. I continued to work part-time at the bakery. But my first college year was a false start; I withdrew from that semester because I began to relapse into anorexia and depression—two things that had developed just prior my senior year of high school. I had barely begun treatment for these struggles before leaving home and living in a dorm—a freedom I wanted and thought I could handle.
I moved back home just before the end-of-year holidays, living with my mother and then stepfather, and soon with my twin sister who came home after a semester at Flagler College. My older sister was gone; she'd fled from an undesirable home environment, a result of the alien-like stepfather (who was really just French-Canadian, but out of a kindness to French-Canadians, it's more fitting to think of him as an alien), after she turned 18 and went back to our home state of Ohio. She had escaped.
My twin sister decided to stay local and transferred to the university I'd just left. We got an apartment together, and she continued going to school while I worked full time at the bakery. I earned a made-up title: Assistant Retail Manager. I enjoyed it for a little while, feeling part of a little work family, learning to do the account books, being physical in my day, and even serving customers I found enjoyable, except for the ones I didn't like. But being around food constantly was difficult, especially with baked goods coming out of the industrial-sized oven all morning long, the yeasty scent wafting in the air. I smelled them, I touched them, I tasted them. Sometimes I took them home, sometimes I ate them in a corner.
I began to feel excessive guilt about my eating habits, which would cause me to refuse food for much of the day, and then give in at night and binge on a loaf of bread or a bag of jelly beans or a box of cereal. I would wake up on the sofa with the television still on, comatose from the calorie overload, drag myself into bed and try to sleep away the shame of knowing what I'd done. Sleep was the best part of my day because I didn't have to be aware of how wrong everything was, how imperfect I was. The cycle would repeat: guilt, starve, binge, coma.
This is how my days went, and the longer they went on, the more I would oversleep just a little bit. Then a little bit more. Until one day I walked in for my 9:00am shift at 10:00am, rather nonchalantly, and the younger brother looked at me from baker's table behind the register and, after glancing up at the clock on the wall, said, "Really, Lee? An hour?" I knew it was coming; they'd been generous to let me slip as much, and for as long, as I had. So I said, "Should I just leave?" with a bit of attitude that was my only defense but that he didn't deserve. And he said, "Yes. As a matter of fact, you should." So I turned around and walked out the door, not looking back.
I cried on my way home, not necessarily because I'd lost my job but because each time I replayed the scene I could hear the sheer irritation in that brother's voice, and I had to live with the fact that my actions had hurt a person and a place I cared a lot about.
I left the bakery in the summer of 2000, when I was 19. This dream has haunted me ever since. I'd gone back to visit on occasion, and at least one time I apologized to the brother who'd fired me, or who'd helped me quit—I was never really sure which had happened. He forgave me with his words, but it was never enough. I wanted him to know and to understand that I wasn't really that person who could be so flippant, so disrespectful. But I couldn't explain my depression to him—partly because I didn't have enough understanding myself, let alone adequate language to explain it, but also because I didn't know whether he'd believe me. Both brothers seemed like the type of person who would think depression is something a person could conquer with enough will.
Over the time I'd worked at the bakery, my weight shifted from normal thin to a bit unsightly thin and back again. In the more severely skinny time, I remember the easy comments from the older brother about how I should just eat more. It was so simple for him; why wasn't it as simple for me? I berated myself for not being strong enough to change.
Sometimes I wish they'd cared more. I wish they'd wondered why my behavior had changed from sweet and attentive and considerate to grumpy and agitated and irresponsible. I say we were close, but in a fair-weather kind of way. If my car needed minor fixing or I needed help moving things, they were there. But when it came to emotional challenges, they didn't have a toolbox for that. Of course it wasn't their job to fix me, but I was really just a kid—a kid in pain who didn't know how to help herself, and they were around me more than anyone else was.
During the months in which I'd been slipping away into a lethargic, apathetic hologram of the real me, my twin had left Orlando to move in with her boyfriend a couple hours away in St. Petersburg. Having no real reason to stay myself, I left too, following her; perhaps even chasing her, as I look back now.
Through a friend of a friend, I'd secured a temporary, hourly job working at the University of South Florida's College of Medicine, doing light administrative work. That position eventually ended but led to a full-time staff position, with educational benefits, in the English Department at USF. I would stay there for more than 12 years, earning my degree, trying to work out my demons, picking up some more along the way, eventually leaving for the job I currently have.
These days, I try to get to work just a little bit early. I don't need to; nobody is watching. But I think that in a way, I might always be trying to prove to those brothers who I really am—and who I am not.
We aren't in touch anymore and haven't been for many years. I looked them both up on Facebook once; the younger one was married with a kid, still Republican, and the other had no visible profile. Any forgiveness that occurs now will have to take place within me. I have to rattle out the ghosts and tell them I know they aren't real. They don't need to occupy anymore space in my mind. Their haunting can cease now.
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