"Hang in there" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

When I finally decided to be vulnerable at dinner, it wasn't courage. It was bankruptcy. I had run out of ways to rescue myself. I remember everyone looking at me before saying the same thing. Everything is going to be okay. Just hang in there. Everyone goes through the same shit. It was almost impressive how many words could fail at once. The deep breaths I took in the bathroom beforehand. The hours I spent rehearsing this conversation. The exits I had already mapped in my head before anyone even spoke. None of it mattered. I just sat there, silent, watching my thoughts become louder than the people sitting across from me.

I kept wondering where exactly I was supposed to hang in there. Where is there? Is it a place? A date on a calendar? A room everyone else somehow found before me? How long does someone hang before they're allowed to let go? Nobody ever tells you that part. They only tell you to keep hanging, as if endurance is an address everyone eventually arrives at. And if there is no there, then what have people like me been surviving toward all this time? Maybe there only exists in the mouths of people who have never needed to look for it.

My eyes drifted away from the table until they settled on the ceiling light hanging above us. I couldn't stop staring at it. Suspended in complete silence. It wasn't trying to reassure anyone. It wasn't searching for the right words. It simply existed, held up by something nobody notices until it breaks. I remember wishing I could speak to it instead of the people sitting across from me. At least it understood what hanging actually looked like. It knew that hanging isn't hope. Hanging is exhaustion stretched so thin that it begins to resemble survival.

One thing I have learned is that you don't tell people to stay strong when the only reason they came to you is because they can no longer be strong. You don't tell people to hang in there when hanging in there is all they have been doing before they ever found the courage to tell you. I don't blame the people who say it. I understand why they do. Some pain arrives at a size that language was never built to carry. Hang in there isn't empty because people don't care. It's what remains after every sentence capable of carrying another human being has already collapsed under the weight.

People hear hang in there and imagine a hand reaching toward someone. I hear the moment language reaches its limit. I think that's what hurt the most that night. Not that nobody cared, but that everyone did. They searched for words because they wanted to reach me, and the best words they could find still couldn't. Some pain is simply larger than language. Maybe that's all hang in there has ever been. Not an answer. Not a promise. Just one human being standing in front of another, quietly admitting, without ever saying it out loud, I wish I knew where there was too.

Maybe that's why I couldn't stop staring at the ceiling light. Not because it knew how to hang, but because nobody expected anything from it. Nobody asked it to reassure the room. Nobody mistook its silence for recovery. It was simply allowed to hang there. I wished, just for a moment, that I could be afforded the same mercy.