"We all carry a story we don't know how to tell yet" by PQHAÜS

"We all carry a story we don't know how to tell yet" by PQHAÜS

(Acrylic on canvas / 30x40 inches / 2025)

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Grief is strange because you're in a grocery store at 11:00 a.m. reaching for cereal and then a smell, something familiar like a candle or soap, hits you and suddenly your body forgets how to stand. You’re not crying, not making a scene, you’re just somewhere else. Grief makes you forget what’s real. You end up outside a house that doesn’t belong to anyone anymore, waiting like the door might open, like they might still be there. And even though you know they’re not, some part of you still hopes. 

It’s like trying to build something out of pieces that don’t fit, and everyone expects you to keep going like your hands aren’t shaking. Grief doesn’t always look like pain. Sometimes it’s just this quiet pressure in your chest or a heaviness behind your eyes. Sometimes you disappear. You’re in the middle of a conversation but your mind is stuck inside a moment that should have lasted forever. It’s not even sadness anymore. It’s just something missing. Something gone that used to take up space in you, and now there’s just this hollow where it used to live.

One day I was standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, watching strangers pass by. I wondered if anyone could see what I was carrying, how close I was to falling apart. And then I started wondering what they were holding too, the kind of pain that lives deep down where words don’t reach anymore. I looked down and saw their shadows. Long, quiet shapes trailing behind them, like each one was pulling something they couldn’t name. The shadows didn’t just follow them, they held something. They looked like stories no one talks about, like secrets packed tight and heavy. I could feel something in them, like silence that had weight. The light changed but I didn’t move. I just stood there, thinking about everything we keep hidden.

My emotions feel like they have been painted over in black and white. Like someone drained the color from everything I used to feel and left it flat and distant. I don’t feel joy, not in a way people expect me to. I don’t even feel grief the way I did in the beginning. Now it is just this constant weight, slow and quiet, sitting in me like fog that never lifts. Most days I feel like I am not really here, like I am watching myself move through the world without actually being in it. 

But grief gave me this one thing. It changed how I see people. I notice the small invisible things, the pause before someone speaks, the flicker in their eyes when they talk about something that clearly hurts, how they pretend they are fine in a way that feels rehearsed. I see the weight in their bodies, the way they move like they are tired in a place sleep cannot reach. I see it tucked into every shadow we pass without thinking. Not poetic shadows. Just real ones, stretching across sidewalks and walls, carrying everything we never say out loud. Some people are not okay and never will be and you would never know unless you looked closely at the way they carry themselves when no one is watching. I think about how many people I have stood next to, sat across from, passed on the street, and never realized they were on the edge of completely falling apart.

I don’t know if I should say grief has tortured my life because maybe it has, but it has also pulled me into places inside myself I never wanted to go and forced me to see the world in a way I didn’t ask for. It made me feel the weight of silence and loneliness like they were parts of me, inseparable and raw. I walk through people now like I’m seeing shadows of the broken pieces they carry but can’t show, like I’m living in a different dimension where pain is both invisible and too loud to ignore. It’s not hopeful. It’s just honest. Grief didn’t save me. It didn’t fix me. It just changed how I see the cracks in the world and the ones inside myself. And maybe that’s all it ever could do.