Philip and Mildred

She doesn’t hate him. She doesn’t even notice him. He mistakes her silence for mystery, when in truth it is vacancy, a hollow corridor echoing with his own footsteps.

His longing clings like mildew, damp and choking, yet she breathes freely, untouched by the stench of his devotion.

Her indifference slices sharper than cruelty, stripping him bare without effort, without intention. He kneels in the theater of his own humiliation, convinced the empty seats are full of witnesses to his suffering.

She scrolls, she yawns, she blinks, while he dissolves into caricature. And in the end, his grand tragedy collapses into nothing more than a man begging at a locked door, unheard, unrequited, and unseen.