"Nothing's wrong" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 24x30 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

Love can grant a kind of delusional power, the kind that keeps a person moving even when reality has already begun to rupture. I once saw a car smoking on the shoulder of a highway while traffic screamed past in waves. A father and his little girl stood against the concrete barrier waiting for help, exposed to breakdown, noise, and uncertainty. But he placed headphones over her ears and let her disappear into a small glowing screen, as if building a border around her mind. He bounced her on his shoulders like a toy horse, making room for laughter where panic should have lived. It felt like watching someone hold back catastrophe with tenderness alone.

I keep thinking about how love can generate a kind of delusional power in moments like that, not by denying danger, but by refusing to surrender entirely to it. It creates a fragile fiction that life is still intact, that calm can still be offered in the middle of collapse. The car was failing, the world around them was indifferent, and still he protected her from the sound of breakdown. There was something unbearably human in that gesture. As if survival sometimes depends on believing, however irrationally, that tenderness can hold against disaster long enough for innocence to remain untouched.

Maybe love does not overcome catastrophe at all. Maybe it only makes it bearable by bending perception, by letting care become a temporary shelter against what cannot be controlled. I am drawn to that cold contradiction, that tenderness can feel almost irrational, even delusional, and yet be the very thing that carries us through ruin. Sometimes love does not save us from disaster. It simply gives us the impossible conviction to keep walking through fire.