“Long black please, no sugar and keep the change.”

“You’re not from around here are you?” A perky voice responds behind the counter and the customer loses his breath.

Somewhere between 56^th Street and Carnegie Hall he lost his bearings and whereabouts.  The barista peeks behind the stainless steel counter and glances towards the lost soul.

The voice behind the counter grabs a paper cup and calls out to the barista. “He wants an Americano.”

The plump lady looks up and down at the boy standing in front of her, shirt untucked and Oxfords laces untied. He’s somewhere between careless and fearless, and looks like a walking corpse lacking sleep. “Name for your order?”

“Kai,” the customer responds unwillingly with a nod and fiddles with a loose strand of hair covering his left eye.

In New York the winters are categorized as mercilessly unforgiving and humid continental but all Kai can think about is the frostbiting wind behind his ears as another stranded citizen lines up behind him. It’s here where individuals who share no similarities are brought together by circumstance, by the newsstand of vividly coloured and graffitied pages advertising Christmas edition toothpastes, crème Brule recipes and the cures for cancer. A mere coincidence Kai thinks, to be under the redwood roof of the Café L'énigme, still identical to that gloomy Sunday morning, where he sipped cortados and chatted with his soon to be ex-employer.

And to be honest, if Kai were to describe himself, he wouldn’t pin down a single word that would cover all his traits, or maybe abnormalities. When he sips newly brewed espressos, the bitter liquid can roll down his tongue like the shadow of forgiveness and slip through crevices of his intestines with something along the lines of relief, but metaphorically speaking, he can’t do the same for others. He’s like the walking clothes rack stylists abandon after each passing day.

He can’t even produce a resume, he can’t picture and place puzzle pieces of linguistics together, it’s physically exhausting and dauntingly tiresome to the extent where it pushes the boundaries between the minutes running too fast and the seconds too slow. By the time Kai catches his breath again, he fills each crack of uncertainty and contemplates his whereabouts in life, he comes up with two phrases; aspiring model, walking clothes rack.

But it’s the latter that he can almost feel gnarling at the tip of the back of his head, nibbling on the nerves in his neck and he forgets time exists again. He tries to find comfort within the memories he has of New York, walking down fast lanes with elites, skittering down runways with straight legs and locked jaws, possessing the most desired body, sharp bones like knives and eyes deeper than the abyss in his mind, he’s always wanted this. He’s always wanted to sport inflated PVC sculpture coats and shiny latex overalls and achieve the desired perfection all pathetic passerbys desperately envied. And although by the time his plastic outer ego is shed when runway lights are turned off, by the moment when space and time drift further apart, he’s just another abandoned corpse that people rent to display on the screens, on the runways, on everywhere where he’s only required to be a mannequin.

The flashy black and white industry washed with high tides of glamour is so pleasing to the eyes Kai thinks sometimes people forget there’s more to human clothes racks than their hollow cheeks and deflated looks of displeasure. He thinks they put too much thought into each crevice and gap on bodies than the graceful poise and precision each step requires. Maybe somewhere between shades of grey and gray one day he’ll lie, confident and not aloof. He wants to be like the shades of each grey, not just black and white, he wants to remain within memories of minds without slipping through cracks of their fingers and corrode with decomposing nature.

And when people write about this oh-so-famous but already dead whatever he was guy in the expensive neon trench coat and in past tense, he wants them to remember the smile he shared with others, the light he had used his whole life to power up, the footprints he had left in the sand and the romance he left behind for the industry, maybe one day when his Frappuccinos leave bitter aftertastes of fatigue, the world will realise he was so much more than be the victim of others’ judgement.

“Double-shot, grande Amercano,” present and past zooms in and out of focus and Kai is standing in front of the plump lady again. He proceeds with two long strides where his order sits, and inhales the smoked flavour of brewed perfection.

When his bats his eyelashes to the woman in front again, her jaw has dropped to the floor and she’s wide eyed, pacing herself backwards and forwards from the magazine rack and back to Kai.

“You’re…you’re…Kai? Kai? The...model?” She turns and there across the hardwood floorboards and white curtains on a rack sits the latest edition of Vogue, the cover consisting of a man with a boy’s smile, a shining presence with one leg propped up and the other straight. And before anyone else realises, Kai smiles at himself, for the first time, in a long time.

“I was.”

“Huh?”

“I was a model. Not anymore. Sorry.” He responds with a small smile, the left side of his face tugging the corners of his mouth higher upwards.

“The rumours were true? You quit? Really?” The female opens and her curiosity makes her blurt out one more question.

“Then, what are you going to do in the future? No more living in the fast lane?” Her smile is crooked but it’s genuine, in which then she produces a quiet but audible husky laugh.

“I’m going to change the world.”

His Adam’s apple rises up but it doesn’t come back down. Kai’s not sure what it is, perhaps his new found obsession with smiling maybe, but maybe he doesn’t need to, because his heart has already decided that for him, and with two smooth strides, he’s out of the glass doors.

In New York the winters are categorized as humid continental and mercilessly unforgiving but all Kai can think about is the rare glimpse of sun radiating off his cheek, not so hollow anymore.