Kai felt miserable today. He had work this morning and he woke up preparing himself. For no reason, frankly. He dressed himself loosely and in just-cleaned clothes. In a good day he’d find it in himself to do laundry or change his sheets or fix up his kitchen. But yesterday was not one of those days. He trudged his still-unshowered self along the bare, wintry street of New York. People of all sizes and ages trudged by him, too, but he did not see people. His eyes picked up on these big headed, big armed, badly knitted dolls. They were all white with only little indents for eyes. They wore the person’s clothes but they didn’t have any of the features or hair color of the person. While it would've horrified anyone, it didn’t do much to him. He was used to the strange looks of the dolls (it was actually the people’s looks as they studied his ragged form), and he just learned to live.
But he still avoided many things. He avoided any reflective surface; he could see himself wedged between all of those giant, wooly monsters, looking scared under his shock of dark, dirty red hair. There was never any emotion in his blue eyes as he looked at himself, either. He always saw himself as a disappointment, and he really quite was. This wasn’t how his parents would want him to live.
But he walked down one, two, four, six blocks to reach his job. It was a high-end communications lab. In college he studied Human Sciences and he managed to get a job at this place. It hadn’t been his first. Before he was on a medication that allowed him to see the people for who they were, but it made him incredibly violent and suicidal. He had tried many times but he was often found by the home-nurse who checked in on him every week and revived. He was taken to many mental health hospitals for his actions and was kept there for many months of his life, only to be released again after taken off of suicide watch. They had helped get him this job afterwards and had him working in a private office down in the basements as he worked with people through a computer screen, which the company itself deduced was the best for him. Away from people in a quiet area was what worked best. Kai was a good worker, too, he just got distracted very often by the looming dolls that were his co-workers or his boss. Hardly anyone saw him, he scared many people, and was never talked to when he was found in the break room. He was forced to take lunches and dinner hours off by the mental health facility, or else he wouldn’t eat at all. He was already scrawny and underweight to hell. They wanted to help him gain weight, but it was a lost cause.
Kai arrived to another day at work. However today was quite different. Today was his birthday. Not that he had noticed. It was Tuesday of September the eighth, 2026. The company did a happy birthday ceremony for each person, no matter their position anywhere in the team.
