"Homesick for a place that no longer exists" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 24x24 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

I grew up hunting for things I could call home. Not because I was never given one, but because even at home, I often felt like something didn’t quite recognize me back. I learned early how to exist inside a place without fully belonging to it, like I was always a step off from where I was supposed to stand. Homesick for something that had not been made yet, something just out of reach but close enough to ache for.

So I started collecting places, moments, and people that felt close enough. Eating Cuban tortas with my friend from a gas station in the rough neighborhood I once lived in became my living room. Watching Little Miss Sunshine became my bedroom. Running trails in the valley at sunset while listening to “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane became my patio. None of it was permanent, none of it was built to last, but for a while, it held. It felt like something I could return to without having to explain myself.

Until it didn’t.

My friend died, and the tortas started tasting bitter. The gas station is now a gentrified apartment building, quiet and clean, like nothing ever happened there. No more loud Friday midnights, no more cheap lights flickering over conversations that didn’t need to go anywhere. Just silence, polished and expensive, replacing something that once made space for us.

“Somewhere Only We Know” became something I avoid. It was playing the moment I realized something in my life was about to break in a way that wouldn’t be fixed. I still remember the exact second the song kept going but everything else stopped making sense. Now I only hear the first few notes before I shut it off. That’s all I can take.

There are people I still carry like unfinished sentences. Some of them left in ways that didn’t give me a chance to say anything back. Some of them are still alive, just far enough away now that we might as well be strangers. It’s a different kind of grief, quieter, harder to explain. No one brings it up, but it lingers the same.

And just like that, the things I once called home were swept away. Not violently, not in some dramatic collapse, but slowly enough that I didn’t notice until there was nothing left to return to. The places are still there in some form, the songs still exist, the streets still run where they always did, but whatever made them mine is gone.

I kept trying to replace it. New places, new routines, new people. I told myself that’s what you’re supposed to do. But everything felt temporary, like I was just passing through something that would eventually move on without me. Even in the spaces I was given, there was always a quiet sense that I was only partially there, never fully claimed, never fully kept.

I think that’s when it settled in. Home was never a place I found. It was something I kept losing. Something that only existed for a moment, and only revealed itself as home once it was already gone.

Now, whenever something feels close, I don’t let it get too close. I can already feel the distance forming before it even happens. I can already see the version of it that will exist without me in it.

That’s the part that stays. Not the memory. Not the place. Just the quiet certainty that whatever feels like home will leave, or I will. And either way, I’ll end up standing in the same place again, holding onto something already disappearing, calling it home while it still lets me.