By the time he walked across the stage to receive his diploma for his doctorate in physics, his family had left him. His wife handed him divorce papers two years into his degree. His 15-year-old daughter stuck around and rooted for him but a year later, she ended up joining her mother. He even lost his house when he forgot to pay the mortgage not once, twice, but six months in a row.

It wasn’t because he didn’t have any money, no, he had plenty of those. It was because he was so absorbed into physics that he would spend every minute of his free time in a corner of the university library, flipping through the pages of the textbooks like he was about to discover something world-changing.

“Why are you trying so hard?” His wife had said once during the few times when she had visited him at the library, sneaking a box of hot meal on the table. “You’re not Oppenheimer with the whole country counting on you to build a weapon to stop a war, you know.”

He was so focused that he didn’t hear a single thing his wife had said. That night, the dinner sat on the table uneaten. By the time his focus finally broke, it was well past midnight. He stood up, grabbed his coat, and left, never even noticed the boxed meal sitting on the table.

For #FFFC