Two years and several attempts to find purpose in the real world
January 3, 2024 | Story and graphic by Marcus Rojas
This article is part of Atrium’s Winter 2023 issue. To view the print edition online, visit our Issuu here
I rolled down our car’s window and extended my gloved hand. Another gloved hand gave me a high school diploma, and a muffled voice congratulated me.
My mom drove out of the bus loop where our graduation ceremony was hosted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The brown brick buildings that housed the final years of my adolescence shrunk in the rear view mirror for the last time. Ahead of me: the real world.
Now what?
The real world was just a rumor my parents and teachers created to keep me focused in class — up until I worked my first odd job a year before my high school graduation.
The hotel restaurant sat on the eighth floor overlooking the Sarasota downtown bayfront. I walked through the ivory-white lobby, rode the elevator up and stepped into the dining room to see my hometown from a top-floor view.
The servers, who were much older than my classmates, felt hesitant about working with a high schooler. But the bar desperately needed a barback for the looming tourist season. I would wipe down tables until a bartender gave me a cue. Then, I snuck behind the bar to cut limes and switch beer kegs.
I didn’t come home from a hard night’s work with a passing test score or a competitive GPA, but with cash tips and a paycheck in my pocket. While I sat in class throughout the week, I daydreamed about the upcoming weekend shifts.
I gradually fell in love with this bar in the sky. But a year later, the pandemic broke the clouds beneath my feet and I tumbled back down to Earth with no college plans or restaurant jobs in mind for the foreseeable future.
Now what?
It was time to carve my own place in the world. As long as it made me money, it could be any job for now.
At the start of the silent pandemic summer, I stepped inside the rusty walls of a welding garage dressed in steel-toe boots and cargo pants. At 18 years old, I was again the youngest person on the job, assembling aluminum railings and spiral staircases among older men who’d been in the real world since before I was born.
One day I was welding with Carlos, a man in his 50s with two daughters.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked me in Spanish.
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t really care about it.”
“You should. Or else He will send you to Hell.”
During the car rides to construction sites, the men enjoyed giving me advice about mortgages and finding a wife to settle down with. A life of welding didn’t feel quite right, but I had nothing else going for me.
Later that summer, an email told me I received a full-ride scholarship to any public university in Florida.
The real world laid out two paths in front of me. I could keep the security of being a welder or attend community college for two years and find a new career. It was a choice that would change my life’s direction, but the cost of staying here was a free college education, to follow this narrow path or open a dozen new ones. I left the welding job in August and started my first classes.
I studied during the week and spent the weekends stocking fruits and vegetables at a Whole Foods a few blocks away from the hotel restaurant I used to work at. On a cold and rainy Valentine’s Day, I was placed in a booth outside the store where I wrapped colorful flower bouquets for the couples and retirement-age customers that made up the majority of my town. I stood there alone in the booth, soaking up the love and petrichor in the air.
The days moved slowly as I drifted between my job and school in my quiet, lonely hometown. All but one of my friends left to join the military or construction trades. Meanwhile, I was facing a limbo of random jobs until I could transfer to a university. It was hard to make new friends in the real world, let alone find people my age.
Moving between odd jobs, I felt like a ghost.
My seasonal contract ended with Whole Foods and I found myself handling flowers again as a gardener during the summer. With another year of community college ahead of me, an acre of plants was my only company as the daydreams of university lulled me into sleepwalking through the hot months.
I tossed around heavy bags of mulch alongside Russel, a young man who enjoyed sharing his guitar videos.
He said he lived in a halfway house with about a dozen people. The gardening shop helped those who came from a past of criminal activity or drug addiction by bringing them together to care for this acre. Hope for the future was the sole reason why I got out of bed, but for once, I saw it in someone else’s eyes too.
Russel was a reminder that no matter how often the real world pulled my life in different directions, it was up to me to carve my own path and find where I belong.
It was early August when I entered the garage doors of The Overton, an open-air restaurant with bare concrete block walls hosting a bar, a coffee station and a cozy lounge. I met the co-owner, Courtney, and had a conversation about the joy of working in restaurants before the pandemic.
“You wanna pick up a couple shifts?” he asked me.
Ainsley, an 18-year-old cashier, worked the register while I ran the espresso station to her left. Her quiet distance from the staff reminded me too much of the real world’s lonesomeness.
I asked if she wanted to learn how to pour a shot of espresso, and she gradually learned how to make lattes and cappuccinos. Later, she invited her friends to hang out as she made drinks for them and shared laughs. While I didn’t have friends to make coffee for, I found new friends to teach.
The real world gave me a break from constant readjustment, and I spent the next year in one place. With that, I was around people my age for the first time since high school.
Garrett loved cars and Formula One racing. Emily painted landscapes. Mercedes planned to live in Paris as an “au pair,” a foreigner who does housework in exchange for a place to live. Alara remembered me from high school.
Starting in August, they joined the staff as I served food and cocktails once again throughout the Sarasota tourism season, and life felt like it did before the pandemic. We almost made it to the 4th of July, but in late June, our co-owner, Chris, announced he was closing the restaurant.
When we shut the garage doors for the last time, the owners let us take home the entire liquor supply. We made cocktails for each other, shared laughs, stuffed the bottles in our car trunks and spent the rest of the afternoon downtown celebrating as if it were the last episode of a brief sitcom show.
And, just like that, the real world took away a place that felt like home. A pattern emerged; I found a comfortable place in life, and the real world rearranged it.
In a month, everything would change again. I received my diploma from community college and was about to move to Gainesville. On August 12, 2022, I shoved all my belongings into my car and drove to the I-75 north ramp as my hometown shrunk in the rearview mirror.
After two years of yearning for purpose and belonging, I found everything I wanted at university: love, friendships, adventures, a couple more odd jobs and a clearer purpose.
A year later, I have two semesters left before graduation. The real world patiently awaits me with each passing day. I have no idea what to expect, but it’s become exciting to wonder.
Those jobs revealed to me a subtle balance between the life crafted by my hands and the unpredictability of the real world.
It took me two years and several odd jobs to embrace it.