"I'm holding 20 hours of my life and I'm not even sure if I want them anymore" by PQHAÜS

"I'm holding 20 hours of my life and I'm not even sure if I want them anymore" by PQHAÜS

(Acrylic on canvas / 24x30 inches / 2025)

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Friday afternoon. 3:45 p.m. The kind of time where the sun feels too bright, too indifferent. I was on my way to work, to serve food to people I didn’t know, to force smiles for strangers who would never ask for my name, all in exchange for money that barely kept me breathing. Rent was overdue. The check engine light had been on for days. My phone was dead, bill unpaid. I sat in rush hour traffic, boxed in and buzzing with noise, asking myself over and over, What’s the point? What’s the point? What’s the point?

Every time the grief rose in my throat, sharp and hot like it wanted to claw its way out, I would hide in the storage room and count to twenty like a kid trying to convince themselves the dark wasn’t real. As if hitting twenty would fix anything. It never did.

At 10:49 p.m., eleven minutes before close, a man walked in. Grey suit, stiff posture, awkward voice. He ordered a cheese pizza like he wasn’t sure how to speak in public. Then he sat down, right across from me, and kept staring. Not in a creepy way, just quiet, searching, like he was trying to find something in my face that I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t take it. I went to the back, grabbed the mop, started cleaning just to give my hands something to do besides shake.

When the pizza was ready, I brought it to him. Handed it over. And he said, softly, like he had to push the words out, “You look a lot like my son. I always wished he had a normal life like yours.” Then he left $200 on the table and walked out.

I stood there, frozen. My hands trembling, heart in my throat. Maybe it was the money, or maybe it was the way someone, this stranger, this grieving father, looked at me and saw someone he lost. Saw something worth seeing. That $200 wasn’t just money. It was twenty hours of pretending. Twenty hours of smiling through the ache. Of pushing down panic. Of counting to twenty in a storage room while the world kept moving without me. I was thankful. But it hurt. Because it gave me time, on a day I wasn’t sure I wanted any.

That night, it wasn’t the money that broke me. It was the feeling of being seen, when I had spent the whole day trying to disappear.

I still walk past that place sometimes. I don’t go in. Just glance through the window. The faces are different, but I know the feeling hasn’t changed. I see the alley where I used to break down when I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The spot where I told myself I couldn’t do it anymore, more than once.

And sometimes I think about that version of me. The one who thought he wouldn’t make it past that shift, that week, that month. I wish I could look him in the eyes, not to tell him it gets amazing, not to give him some inspirational speech, but just to say: You’re still here. You made it. And yeah… it got better. Not perfect. But better. And that was enough.