I Will Not Be Ignored

She was nothing more than a smile in front of a bag of bones. Some saw her, some never saw her at all, but if you did, you’d just look through her. That’s just how it is. That was the nature of the job. She knew how it went, to be so preoccupied with so many thoughts popping into your head that you look past the obvious for the illusive.

She knew what it was, she saw it every day. People like you and me walking into a busy restaurant. So concerned with finding a table or the rest of our party that we look past the “wait to be seated” sign. She was used to that, but did we have to look past her too? Was she so unimportant and ordinary that it was easier to just look through her than to notice her? Had she become a specter, some translucent apparition that some sensed while others ignored?

She hated that. Being ignored. She also hated that she could never stand up for herself. She was such a push over that instead of wearing a nametag she wore the dirty shoeprints from the world around her.

“Can we put a mannequin up there or something?” Waiters often complained. “All the customers just seat themselves. Where’s the structure?”

“What about a mirror?” Chad, the server, suggested. “Everyone always stops and looks at a mirror.”

No one would fire her. She worked at Pineapple-Ant’s, a popular corporate chain in a small Midwest town. Corporate businesses never fire anyone. Anything’s better than shelling out unemployment. That being said, the mirror would’ve paid for itself by now.

One of the days she worked she decided to be more like her competition, the mirror, Chad always mentioned. She decided that when she clocked in, she would pretend to be a mirror. She’d see do as the customers, maybe she could stop them if she acted like them. As it turns out, she made a better wall than a mirror. Customers began complaining that her reflections were just her mocking them. That’s when the managers began to notice her for the first time since hiring her. The managers would comp the meal and beg them not to leave a bad review. Corporate restaurants hate bad reviews. So, leadership was forced to take action.

“What about a mask?” Eric, the manager, asked.

“How ‘bout a mirror?” said Chad.

“Well,” said Greg, assistant manager. “What kind of mask?”

“How ‘bout one with a mirror?” suggest Chad.

“I saw some Sandy the Squirrel masks,” suggested Missy, the server passing by. “You know the one from SpongeBob?”

“That could work.”

“But what about a mirror?” Chad asked one more time.

“The mask is cheaper,” the manager said shrugging his shoulders.

“Alright, but the mirror would’ve paid for itself by now.”

However, her voice was as dull and annoying as the moans of a passive-aggressive ghost. With the mask, most customers thought she was an animatronic gimmick. The gimmick, if that’s what you could call her, wasn’t a very good one either. She scared the children, startled the women and gave the old folks something to complain about.

That was the most annoying part. Not one person noticed her until she put that mask on. Now every wrinkled old person on their way out the door had to throw in their two cents about how machines were taking everyone’s jobs. The startled women with scared children really caused an uproar. There wasn’t one frantic mother that didn’t run out that door and onto the internet. The mothers always hit restaurants where it hurt, in the reviews.

The reviews degraded the restaurant saying this is what happens when corporate fat cats try to run a business in a small town. Complaining that not only was some local losing their opportunity to a machine, but on top of that the machine was terrifying. The machine was lifeless, it’s voice as dead as a cemetery. Corporate wouldn’t stand for this, soon those fat cats would be breathing down the manager’s neck.

After taking the mask away, everyone was looking for a solution. Some said fire her, but unemployment was still too expensive. Some said to train a monkey, but they didn’t have the time or resources.

“The mirror would’ve paid for itself by now,” Chad reminded everyone. 

But when push came to shove, the managers and the rest of the staff agreed to do what every human does when faced with a tough decision. They ignored it.

Eric, the manager told the staff, “I would rather the restaurant descend into chaos than have to do something and keep thinking like this.”

Everyone agreed that thinking of a solution was hard. So, they went back to business as usual. She was left as she was before, completely plain, hauntingly dull and thus completely ignored. Left to be breezed past and looked through until she couldn’t take it and would finally quit. She was beginning to realize that the cold breeze of a ghost wasn’t from its spookiness, but from the whoosh of a world leaving it behind.

In truth, she hated her job. She hated her coworkers, the customers. Everyone. She hated that building with the smell of grease, slick floors and the sound of that damn above the door. But, if she was really being honest with you, more than she hated her job and everything associated with it, more than the long commute and meager pay, more than any of that, she hated herself.

She hated herself for staying there out of comfort and convenience. She was trotted over and pushed aside everyday of her life just to afford an apartment she hated in a town she couldn’t stand. She hated it more and more every single second that her youth died with each tick of the clock. Was a dream worth this?

She could set the dream aside. She could compromise and settle for something more obtainable. When she thought like this, she hated herself even more. She always saw her younger self, staring back at her. The young girl’s big blue eyes catching the light and wonder as she tells her, “It’s too hard, we just can’t do it. You don’t know how hard it is. I tried and couldn’t do it, but look what I have? See, look! Look!”

Then her younger self’s perfect baby face changed, those big blue eyes froze over with tears as her rosy lips twisted into confusion. That looked was burned into her mind, that distraught look of a child eyes bouncing left and right just before the dream breaks and the young girl realizes what the adults mean. Before she screams out, before expression, between the processing and the absurdity, the senselessness and the realization, the moment the child searches her little mind for a dream an adult let die.

That was the face she saw every morning when she woke up and before she went to sleep at night. The face of her younger self caving beneath her unforeseen failures. That’s why she wanted to believe there was meaning, that the montage in her head wasn’t nonsense, that the images did tie together. More than anything she wanted to believe that it all meant something, that she would be something more than just ignored. Yet, everyday she tried to be something more, but she just ended up a hostess and the lowest. She felt a gnawing tension clenching her throat and tearing her between the belief that it all meant something and the belief that it all added up to nothing.

She hated how she felt and she resented the world for making her feel. She resented everything and everyone not only for never seeing her or knowing who she was, but for never tying one question to another so they could see who she was. No one ever did though and so, she hated everyone.

She felt justified in her hate for everyone and everything including you and me, as anyone of us in her place would also feel. It wasn’t how everyone treated her, that’s not why she felt justified in her hate. She felt justified because what she was trying to do was so much greater than anything that her coworkers, customers and the rest of us would ever do. We’re big dumb fish floundering in a small dumb pond. We only think we’re big because the pond’s small. We don’t realize we’re floundering because it’s always been this way. We’re floundering towards what we think is greatness because we can only see greatness as a three-bedroom townhouse and a 401K. She tells herself she doesn’t care every day. She tells herself its temporary. The breakthrough’s coming, she believes that. She just has to stay true to her plan.

In her dream, she always fancied herself after the mad hatter selling insurance between brain teases on their way to discover E=MC². She pictured herself in obscurity to give herself purpose. She was as invisible as a scribe before the audience has read a word.

“It’s all relative,” she thought. “I will be ignored for as long as I allow myself to be. So then when I do make noise, not only will it be heard from across the oceans, but it will be so loud no one will be able to look at anything else.”

She would be the sucker punch we never saw coming. We’re all too busy to ever shut up. We’re chit-chatting funhouse mirrors built for two. There’s always going to be two sides to every coin. She always thought when it came to luck, she’d rather flip the coin than to chat any longer.

She was close, she knew it, no one else had a clue. No one could see it for what it truly was. If they knew they’d laugh and call her crazy, at best. At worst, they’d steal it.

She was upon the edge of greatness. An abyss of golden beams and untouched dreams lay beneath her as she clutched a tree branch. Stretching out she reached for what we call unattainable. With one foot above the golden abyss and the other slipping off the earth, she was almost there, inches, centimeters, she was there! How has she not gotten it yet? Then the limb snapped and she fell only to wake up in her apartment.

She looked at the masterpiece she had fallen asleep on top of. She had felt so close last night. Now all she was close to were the sounds of a jackhammer. In the midst of her late-night frenzy, she lost her head. Maybe she could find where she left off after her job. Her job! she was late. She could tell by the way the light hit the shades she had slept too late. She was in the shower when she realized she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care to make ends meet through a shithole job. She didn’t care if she was ignored. She just wanted to track down the sand in the gears halting her persistence of memory. Her Mona Lisa was missing the crook in her mouth.

There she was lost. Somewhere under a thick skull that rattled to the sound of her shower. Somewhere between Lalaland and dissociative the pitter-patter of water ran down her porcelain face as steam rose. She was a doll in a glass case no one wanted to see, but she knew she was a treasure. She just didn’t know where the treasure was buried.

She stepped out of the shower and moseyed to dry off, each motion followed by another through well-worn ruts. Then before she knew it she was through her commute and outside of her job, two hours late.

She drifted through the back door, floated past her coworkers unaware of her hauntings. Her footsteps as faint as a ghost rattling chains. Then as she made her way to the front someone walked in through the door.

She began to reach for the menus. She had never had this happen before. The customer stopped, adjusted her hair and cleavage and then moved on as usual. Upset, she sat down the menus. Her hopes had been crushed and for what? Why did she want to be noticed by these people?

And then a family walked through the door and stopped, looking into what she can only assume were her eyes. She reached for the menus, but the mom licked her finger, rubbed it against the grime of her son’s face before moving on. This happened again and again, each time the customers pausing a moment before taking their seat.

After an hour she saw the mirror. It hung behind her alongside a new sign reading “PLEASE: SEAT YOURSELF.” She tried to get someone’s attention, but the everyone was too busy ignoring her. She had been replaced. No one noticed her before and now there was no need for her. They didn’t even tell her. How long could she have stayed clocked in haunting the restaurant until someone noticed?

No one did notice, so she left. She didn’t clock out, she just left. She went home got her work and then returned to her job. She floated past everyone so engaged in life they missed the phantom passing by. Then she sat down behind the hostess stand and began her work. She worked between the clock as she chased greatness in the darkness of plain sight. The wool was over everyone’s eyes and there she found the time to finish her work. 

It was done. Years of work finished as she carried the decimal and double checked her work, but she had done it. The equation was finished. She had sealed her name at the top of the list of a boys’ only club. She pushed herself alongside Einstein, Edison, Gutenberg and Tesla. She was there, a plain faced girl amongst bald heads and bushy beards. She wanted to tell everyone, her coworkers, the customers and anyone else she saw, but she didn’t. Instead, she slipped the equation up her sleeve and emailed it to the lead physics professor at MWIT.

The next day at work as she was about to clock in she bumped into Eric, the Manager.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Eric shook his head. “Are you so without purpose that you’re still here? We hung that mirror up months ago.”

She didn’t know what to say, she had half-expected to pass through him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Uhhhhh,” she tried to speak. “I’m waiting for a professor to email back about my theory of time-travel.”

His face became as blank as hers. Did she just say that? It was the truth, but had she even really created the equation? Did she imagine all of this?

“Get better jokes,” He finally said.

“Whoa, what’s the ghost doing here?” ask Greg, the assistant manager. “We need a séance or a guru or something, this thing won’t take a hint.”

She didn’t say anything. She just walked away and hid behind the hostess stand. The managers shrugged their shoulders, corporate still wouldn’t sign off on firing anyone despite the mirror paying for itself. She just wanted to be gone, to leave and never have to haunt the walls of this purgatory again. She wanted to be surrounded by reporters asking her how she stayed at such a medial job with this monument to humanity hidden in her mind? How didn’t she go crazy?

“Can they fire her if she’s crazy?” She overheard her coworkers at the end of the shift.

“She’s clearly lost it. Telling everyone she invented time-travel.”

“What a load of crap? I liked her better when she was dead to us. Now that she’s a ghost she’s just annoying.”

“I say we file a petition for an unsafe work environment.”

“Yeah!” the group echoed.

Why did she speak? She didn’t want to return, but soon she’d get an email from someone smarter than she’ll ever be, degrading her purpose and the only way she had out of psychological torture and mundane senselessness of the small town. Soon enough she’d get a reply with her equation shot full of holes and ridiculed by a professor aiming down the sights of a PHD.

“Fuck him,” she thought. Then she emailed him again. That was when the email boomeranged back. Was it real? In her inbox was a message from the lead professor of physics at MWIT. Her throat seized and her hands clammed up, her nerves rattled under her skin as the email popped open.

“To whom it concerns,

You didn’t give me your name, but call my office ASAP. I believe you have something here. My secretary is expecting your call. Tell her who you are. Thank you for reaching out. I hope realize what this means.

Yours truly,

Dr. Albert Hopskins”

  She dialed the number. The world became muffled by the tunnels in her eyes. She was going to hurl, but the phone was ringing. She couldn’t hang up, but each ring grew more as blood flooded her ears. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t. It had to be a dream. She would never escape. Soon enough she’d wake up to the image of her distraught younger self processing a broken dream. Then she’d go to work as a deranged phantom. Haunting a place, she never wanted to be for the rest of eternity. It was them. They sent the email. Hang it up before they get the better of you. The secretary would be waiting, it was a dirty joke that everyone was in on, but her. Was that it? She should just hang up the phone. They were all just pulling a joke on the ghost, huh? And then-

“Hello, Dr. Hopskins’ office, Tracy speaking. May I ask who is calling?”

“Yes, ma’am I’m-“

“I’m sorry dear, I’m getting another-“

“I am Eleanor! And I will not be ignored anymore!”