Invisible Part 1

           Try as she might, she couldn’t get the man out of her head.

            He hadn’t been extraordinary, at the time. Just another customer, another set of features shrouded in monotony. She’d given the hand attached to the features a coffee and a smile and sent him along his merry way. Nothing unusual. Straight on to the next coffee, the next order, the next wave in a sea of mid-morning faces. The day had passed in its normal haze of reheated eggs for sandwiches and reheated thoughts of quitting this shit job. Soon, the dry, rehydrated thoughts droned on as her body and smile went about on autopilot, I’ll be out of here. The next dirty look or needlessly complicated order, and I’ll be straight out the door. I’ll throw this stupid nametag and this stupid uniform and this stupid life right in my manager’s face and I’ll be gone. As always, dirty looks and needlessly complicated orders came and went, and as always she stayed. She clocked out at four with a forced smile to apathetic coworkers. She got into her 1999 Suzuki Shitbox, and drove home.

            Home, however, was somewhat of a misnomer. If home is where the heart is, then her home had left her six weeks ago today, and taken all of its shirts and socks and the television and worst of all the bookshelf.  As she pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex and struggled, once again, to find a spot remotely near the doors – the roofing company was here, again, their huge cherry picker taking up five or six perfectly good spots – she realized that the bookshelf was the worst wound. The empty drawers could be ignored and the now blank spot in the living room that she’d never really looked at anyway was easy to overlook. But looking at those stacks of books in the corner of the living room, hastily assembled into piles that only gave the fleeting impression of organization, gathering dust and bleak memories in equal measure… that was the worst. She wish he would have just taken the books too. He’d destroyed her heart. Did he have to leave the ghostly ruins behind?

            She found a spot at the outer edges of the lot, pulled the sputtering Shitbox in with ease. It was her fault, really. All of it. And that was the worst. One drunken night, one sordid fling had brought the whole thing crashing down. Brian had made her happy for three lovely years. There had been fleeting notions of marriage darting about at the edges of conversation, like dust fluttering in a morning sunbeam, visible only from the very edges of vision and dispersed at the slightest movement to catch them.  It was easy to pretend that she didn’t know why, exactly, she had cheated. Easy to think that she had been upset from the argument she and Brian had had earlier in the day, and some part of her wanted to hurt him. Easy to think that it was a lack of clear thinking brought on by the sweat of dancing and the burning hum of alcohol. Easy to blame her parents, the years she had spent as a child watching her parent’s marriage dissolve slowly in a stew of “special friends” and “urgent business”. Easy enough to avoid the clear, simple truth: she thought she could get away with it, and so she did it.

            The thought pained her. As always. She pushed it away. As always.

            In her daze of stewing thoughts, she’d crossed the parking lot and approached her front door. A brief struggle ensued with the groceries she carried and the key ring that, of course, she had unthinkingly placed in her purse, even knowing that she’d need it again almost immediately and holy shit that guy hadn’t paid.

            She stopped.

            That guy hadn’t paid. That man among a sea of faces, he didn’t pay a dime for his coffee.

            She struggled to remember his face so that she could tell the Greg on Monday. They wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, but at least they could be on the lookout for him if he tried it again. Yet try as she might, hard as she might, absolutely nothing came.

            That was odd. True, she had been lost in her monotonous haze of the workday, running on autopilot and, by then, nearly running on empty but… something should have stood out. Usually, she was good with faces. A good barista –and, hate it as she might, she was a good barista – had to be. In this moment, however, standing by the door, letting her ice cream melt slowly in the heat of the open-air entrance of the complex, she couldn’t even remember if he was white or black or anything. Couldn’t remember an eye color, or a hairline, or even what he had been wearing. A suit? Workout clothes? Jeans and a t-shirt? A dress, damnit? Anything? She tried and tried, but the vision escaped her. It as if she had been looking at someone’s shadow, well enough to get their outline – enough to tell that he had been a him- but unable to make out a single discernable feature.

            The cherry-picker roared to life, taking someone up or someone down, and she was snapped from her thoughts. “Shit,” she mumbled, finally yanking the keys from their lodged position under her purse.

            She went inside, and resolved to think nothing else of the matter.

            Naturally, she failed at not thinking about it. Through dinner, an early bedtime with the same book she’d read a dozen times since her home had disappeared, the only one that hadn’t found itself in the stack she didn’t want to touch, and the tossing and turning of a sweltering apartment she couldn’t afford to air-condition, it haunted her. She tried to remember his voice. Nothing. She tried to remember if he had any facial hair. Nothing. She tried to remember if she had ever seen him before. Noth-

            She sat bolt upright, the large, bright red letters of her alarm clock bouncing dimly against the room, coating it in a layer of crimson. No, she hadn’t seen him before, had she? This entire debacle, this whole process, this vague struggle of recollection, it all seemed so steeped in Déjà vu, didn’t it? As though she’d done this a dozen times before. As though she’d lay here, night after night, pondering a faceless ghost who wasn’t there, unable to remember that she couldn’t remember?

            Bare feet scrambled over carpeting, then tile. A pen. She searched the kitchen for a pen and paper, throwing unopened mail that was too painful to Brian’s new address, throwing things out of drawers – tape dispensers, plastic baggies, and a broken, spilled highlighter. “A man with no face,” she began speaking aloud, as though to solidify the thought in the air before it slid, so liquid, beneath the surface of her mind. “A man with no face comes in every day and doesn’t pay for his coffee. A man with no face comes in every day and doesn’t pay for his coffee. A man with- Where the fuck are the pens!?” She suddenly screamed into the silent apartment, “You took everything else, Brian, did you have to take the fuckin’ pens?!”

            Apparently, yes, he did.

            She frantically grabbed the shattered highlighter from the floor, tested it against her palm. Not much juice left – most of it had dried out – but maybe enough.  Already, she could feel the thoughts evaporating, too ephemeral and light to be grasped for long. Desperately, she spun to the white, blank face of the refrigerator and started scrawling out what remained of the message in jagged, rushed lettering.

She stared at it a moment. The words seemed strange, suddenly. The whole situation, the mess in the kitchen, seemed strange. Was she really standing here, pantless and panting in the kitchen, among the ruins of drawers and a minefield of office debris? No, she decided. She wasn’t. This was too strange to be real. Just a crazy dream, an insomniac’s growing disconnect with reality. Dropping the highlighter – surely, she hadn’t just scrawled a strange secret message to her future self all across the front of the apartment’s refrigerator, likely an offense that would be taken out of her security deposit – she lumbered her way back to the bedroom, not trying to avoid the mess on the floor.

Lying back in her bed, bathed in the crimson glow, she decided not to think about anything, and so she didn’t. For the first time in six weeks, she had a dreamless night’s sleep.