He lived in a departure lounge. Not a real one — in the one inside his head. He lived as if his real life was still on its way, as if everything happening now was a long, overextended prologue with his takeoff endlessly delayed. He sat in that lounge and stared through a foggy window at the runway where other people’s planes — bright, swift, blazing — kept lifting off one after another.

Every success that wasn’t his felt like a personal humiliation. Unable to bear it, he flipped the game: he started collecting other people’s flaws so he could stop being the disgraced passenger and become the judge. Each morning he unlocked his phone, and the screen turned into that same murky pane. Here’s a classmate posting a marathon photo — happy, sweaty, medal hanging on his chest. He carefully filed the snapshot away. Exhibit №347: “Joy, reserved for those with good genes.” Here’s a friend sharing a restaurant picture with her husband — anniversary, candles. Exhibit №512: “Love put on display.” Here’s a coworker announcing a promotion. Exhibit №784: “Success meant for people who know how to suck up.”

The judge persona quickly became the only way he could look at the world. It spread through his life like mold. When friends asked him out and he declined, their brief hesitation, their polite “well, maybe next time” — he would seize it and sign off the verdict with cold satisfaction. Exhibit №921: “They invited me, but didn’t insist. Their friendship is counterfeit.”

That bitter “rightness” was the foundation of his prison. He was both the inmate and the most vigilant guard.

A conversation with him was an interrogation you weren’t warned about. Your joy, your simple anecdote, immediately turned into the prime evidence of your own superficiality. He didn’t listen — he scanned, searching your words for the flaw that would let him pass sentence.

His silence wasn’t quiet; it was the judge’s pause before reading the verdict. People who entered that field instinctively started defending themselves without knowing why. They spoke softer, as if afraid to disturb the courtroom order. They hid their smiles the way you hide a key piece of evidence. And then they simply stopped showing up.

He watched them leave and ticked another box. Exhibit №2404: “The crowd always flees from the truth.”

Tonight was like any other. Silence. The perfect exhibit proving that you aren’t needed by anyone. He sat in the kitchen, almost savoring the flawlessness of his gray world, his reinforced-concrete correctness.

And then a drill shrieked behind the wall.

Sharp, brazen, disrespectful to his quiet. The first reaction was the usual, cozy irritation. “There you go, even at home there’s no peace. The world is hostile.” He was ready to capture that feeling, dissect it, and place it in the archive.

But the drill kept going. It screeched, biting into concrete. The sound was so alive, so shamelessly real that it couldn’t be dried out and turned into an exhibit. And suddenly, listening to that stubborn, working, living noise, he understood something terrifying.

Someone on the other side of the wall wasn’t waiting. Wasn’t collecting grievances. They weren’t pondering whether the world was fair. They were simply cutting a hole in the wall. A noisy, ugly, dusty hole. Because they needed a shelf. Right now.

The thought was so simple that his mind, trained to build elaborate structures of resentment, froze for a second. On one scale pan there was him, with a massive collection of dried proof that nothing can change. On the other was the person behind the wall who just drills the hole.

The drill stopped.

And in the stunned silence he felt, for the first time in his life, not righteous but hollow. His collection, his cherished trove, crumbled to dust.

He looked at his hands resting on the table. They seemed to smell not of soap but of old archive paper.

Then he heard it: a single drop slipping from the tap into the sink. The sound of it hitting the metal was identical to a starter pistol shot.