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You're alone, and the golden light filtering from the high ceilings only makes the room seem bigger. From behind the bar you can see straight through the lobby and out the front door, which hisses open to let in people with masks, with suitcases, with looks of exhaustion. You haven't gotten quite used to the sound of the airplanes from the airport next door flying low over your head, melding slowly with the sky, but you have already gotten used to the transient hotel guests, the six remotes for the two television sets. You've started to enjoy asking people what they do for work and getting interesting answers. Like the guy whose job is to alter the chemistry of water in order to make it safe to use when washing heavy electric machinery. Or the flight attendant who always puts a blazer on over her sports bra and leggings, who always manages to order the same can of beer despite the questions she asks you about wine. 

Earlier during your shift, there was a wedding reception. A few of the bride's friends order vodka sodas from you to be kind, but it's clear when they bring in the first case of white claws that this is not the sort of wedding party who will engage heavily with the bartender. These shifts have remained fun not because you are busy and entangled with customers, but rather because you can bring a book and few people find it necessary to disturb you as you warm up one of the frozen pizzas and read, sipping sparkling water and lime juice. Sometimes you add a little of the lavender tonic, your own special little cocktail. 

There are times when you have observed wedding parties and felt nothing but happiness, your body tense with hope for the couple's future, feeling periodic bursts of energy at the idea of a whole room of people together to celebrate other people. But this time it feels different. This time, you just feel lonely, smiling and uncertain in your button down shirt with martini glasses on it and your little black jeans. You've never been alone--that's been a large concern of your friends lately, but it does feel especially lonely to exist as yourself sometimes. 

The bride emerges in grey sweatpants and a matching gray crew neck, with the word "wifey" across the chest and down one leg. Her hair still falls in big, loose curls around her face, but her wedding makeup is gone. You say congratulations, but your voice is too quiet and your presence is too associated with work, with service, with industry, for the words to really matter. She doesn't order anything to drink. 

It begins to feel, a little, as if you are melting into the background of the bar. People in the wedding party seem happy, at least it looks that way, what with them being just far enough away for the hotel lobby's music to drown out the sounds of their voices. One of your jobs, an older one that you had a few years ago, asked you to only wear certain colors so that your outfits, yourself, wouldn't be such a generous eyesore to the rest of the restaurant. Always meant to be available, but not quite independent enough to exist. And yet, even at that job, you never felt quite the sensation that you are feeling now, as if you are slowly and gently turning translucent, eyes moving subtly past you, through and out to the other side. 

When you were young, and somebody asked you what kind of superpower you would choose if you could have any one that you wanted, you always chose to be invisible, mainly because the idea of flying seemed like it would feel too much like a roller coaster, and you never liked those. Something about that feeling of your body leaving your stomach behind it as it rushed forward, it unsettled you, raw discomfort taking up any room for excitement, or thrill, or glee. But anyway, you always imagined being invisible as the kind of superpower that would make other tasks easier, the kind where you could sneak around and do things for people that they had always wished nobody could see. Something like turning invisible to do laundry, or to pick up the shit left behind by your dog, or even just to take a break from tiresome small talk with your acquaintances but not your friends. Turning invisible, to you, never seemed like it would erase the meaning associated with your existence, but rather simply smudge your physical presence in order to blend it with the background, like a painter might do when they messed up on a tree or a shrub in a much larger landscape painting. 

But today, here in this bar, behind it, you realize for the first time that being invisible doesn't necessarily mean the opportunity to take a break from being perceived in someone's vision, but rather it means feeling less and less significant to the overall meaning of a moment, until it feels as if you aren't really there at all. 

You've never felt passionate about bartending, have always found it strange to call yourself a bartender. Tending to drinks and to alcoholics as if they need you, need your gentle hand to keep them pieced together. How you got involved in bartending in the first place is rather confusing to you--you don't particularly like people, haven't ever been told that you are personable. 

The real story is that you started doing it for someone else--someone you fell in love with who was a bartender, someone who really was passionate about it. In a way falling in love with them felt like falling in love with all of the things they loved. And so you became a bartender to get closer to them, a person who made being loved feel like finding home. A person like that, they can make anything seem fascinating, make anything seem beautiful. And to be loved by a person like that, that could make someone even as ordinary as you seem fascinating, seem beautiful. 

The passionate bartender eventually left you behind. And how couldn't they? People like that, people who are willing to acknowledge their passions so openly, they lose interest in people who need to constantly be told what to do next. 

And so here you are, your skin slowly fading to clear, your eyes setting with the sun in the window behind you, bartending while simultaneously slowly ceasing to exist. What do you say when people ask you to say something about yourself? Fortunately the question doesn't come up very often, because sometimes it feels like there isn't really a single thing to say in response to it. 

The dishwasher in the back is broken, has been since you started working here. So you wash each glass by hand, filling the sinks up with water so hot it makes the skin on your hands feel as if it could peel right off. It's a frustrating task because you know how much easier it would be if the dishwasher were fixed, but that in some way makes it feel more interesting. Five years into bartending and you still feel the desire to cut your teeth, to exhaust and hurt yourself with work in order to prove your toughness, to have the badge of deserving to be here. You don't want to move up, no, you don't want your whole self to exist in the limitations of bartending, but you do want to at least feel alive while you're doing it. The griminess of your fingers when you use them to scrape a dirty salt rim in scorching soapy water feels like work, or at least what you have always understood to be the meaning of the word. 

That's the thing about work, isn't it? It isn't supposed to be invisible, it's supposed to be proven by the very fact of what would collapse without it, you're supposed to feel the effects of it physically, a visceral gripping of the concept on your mind and your body, at least when it's at its most meaningful. Is that what bartending is to you? Is that why you feel the most engaged when you're scrubbing dishes like you're a fifteen year old in the back kitchen of a grimy American diner? You've never quite moved past the understanding of work as something that you must do because you need the money. It's been difficult to understand the worth of your time outside of dollars, how else to conceptualize the way a sparkling clean glass shines when you've been the one to wash it?