"We will wait" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

One time at an airport late at night, on my way out of a place I no longer recognized as home, I stood in front of a vending machine trying to buy a Diet Pepsi. I inserted $1.25. The can dropped halfway, then got trapped behind a warped plastic panel that looked as if it had been damaged years ago and simply absorbed into the architecture of the machine.

I remember how disproportionate my anger felt. I shook the machine. Kicked it. Hit the glass hard enough for someone sleeping nearby to wake up and stare at me with the kind of caution usually reserved for people unraveling in public. Maybe I was. Sleep deprivation alters the scale of suffering. Tiny inconveniences begin casting enormous shadows. A stuck soda can starts feeling less like an accident and more like a personal accusation from the universe itself.

But even then, I knew it was never about the Pepsi.

I think I just needed something in front of me that physically mirrored the sensation of being unable to move forward. Because eventually, after enough departures, your life stops feeling lived and starts feeling temporarily stored somewhere. You continue functioning, speaking, traveling, replying to messages, but internally you begin experiencing yourself as luggage left circling endlessly on the wrong carousel.

So I stood there staring at the can for a long time. Longer than anyone should stare at a vending machine.

And slowly, the can stopped looking manufactured.

Under the fluorescent light, surrounded by rows of metal spirals, it began to resemble a white bird caught inside the machine. Not wounded. Not even struggling. Just suspended there in a state that felt stranger than suffering. As if it had remained trapped for so long that captivity itself had started becoming spatially normal to it. But there were still traces of fighting against the glass. Traces of it trying to escape.

I think that was the part that unsettled me most.

Not pain, but adaptation. The possibility that human beings can grow accustomed to emotional confinement so gradually that eventually they stop identifying it as confinement at all. Your inner life quietly acclimates to limitation. You learn how to continue existing around your own absence.

Back then, there were still people waiting for me somewhere else in the world. People who loved me. People who believed I would eventually arrive as a more complete version of myself. But mentally, I had already become difficult to reach. Not because I wanted isolation, but because exhaustion had turned my consciousness into a room with failing electricity.

I think about that bird often now.

I want to believe it eventually escaped the machine. That somewhere beyond the fluorescent light, it remembered movement again. And maybe now it waits quietly near other trapped birds, not to rescue them, not to force the glass open, but simply to remain nearby long enough for them to realize the world outside the machine still exists.