There was a girl, a pretty cocktail waitress with chin-length brown hair, dressed in the jet-beaded, flapper-style dress, with the words: “Dare to awaken” tattooed in typewriter font between her shoulder blades.

I watched her standing with her back to the corner where someone had vomited; she was waiting for a man with a mop to come and clean it up before the other bar patrons noticed and were put off their $13 cocktails.

She appeared irritated, and understandably so. . I, too, would find frustration in the task of guarding vomit. But more than irritated, she looked bored—not just in the moment, the place and situation she presently found herself in, but profoundly and irretrievably bored.

Her big, dark eyes were empty: she wasn’t daydreaming, wasn’t imagining herself somewhere better—not sitting on a beach near the equator, digging her toes into the warm, damp sand; not standing out on a balcony, looking out on an entire city lit from within its buildings; not lying in bed beside a man who knew that gently sweeping his fingertips against the backside of her arm helped her to fall asleep. She imagined none of this, and nothing else.

She stood there, the people around her drinking and laughing, pushing buttons on their cell phones and watching the front door each time it opened or closed.

This must be what irony truly is, I thought. It isn’t clever or forgiving or just, but tragic and irrevocable. It is a girl with vacant eyes, standing amidst the pack of sleeping fools, the chance for awakening a vague and distant daydream.