"But we are still friends though right?" by PQHAÜS

"But we are still friends though right?" by PQHAÜS

(Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inches / 2025)

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I got my license the moment I could, not because I wanted freedom but because I had to. My dad’s business was falling apart, crumbling slow and quiet, but he still made sure I went to bed with a full stomach. Made sure I never felt like the kid who had less.

Even with all that weight, I was the first in school to drive. That old car became everything. Saturdays, I would pick up my friends, swing by the drive-thru, then skate until the sun sank. Music loud, windows down, laughter spilling out like we would never run out of time.

And for a while, we did not. Just noise, sunlight, and the kind of innocence you do not realize you are losing. We would stare at the sky like it meant something, like it was promising we would always be this way.

Now I am still in that car, but it is silent. I drive to work with ghosts. The passenger seat, the backseat, empty except for frozen time I keep trying to thaw in my head.

They are not here, but I still hear them. The voices, the teasing, the endless gossip about a world we thought was everything.

But that world is gone. We are gone.

We do not talk. Do not ask. Do not even look back. No one told us that someday we would be strangers. That one day the people you could not go a day without would just drift off into their own lives and never turn around.

Maybe that is the cruelest part of growing up. No big fight. No final goodbye. Just a slow, quiet fading. One day you are all crammed into the same car, shouting over each other, planning futures you swore you would share. Then life creeps in. Different paths. Unanswered texts. Missed birthdays.

And before you know it, the people who once felt like home are just names you scroll past, memories you flinch to remember because they still hurt in places you did not know could ache.

It is not sorrow. It is not even distance.

It is just silence.

And no one tells you how loud that silence gets.