"You were ready for it, I never was" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 24x24 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

Since then, I keep thinking about the word end. Not death. Not grief. Just end. A small word for something large enough to erase a person. I keep wondering how someone becomes familiar enough with their own ending that it no longer feels like a stranger.

I imagine it as a dark tunnel. Bare feet against cold concrete. A place you have never been before yet somehow recognize. You hear your own name echoing from the other side, just enough to know something is waiting.

Whenever my thoughts get too close to that tunnel, I force them elsewhere. Because eventually the question stops being about your end and starts becoming about mine. There is a point where the thought begins to sound convincing. Worse, comforting. That is usually when I leave it alone.

I remember sitting across from you in a cold hospital room, using my fingers to count how many versions of reality still existed where you lived. How many paths remained where you stopped being sick, where your body changed its mind, where the doctors walked back into the room carrying a miracle they had forgotten to mention.

My fingers never changed. The number never changed.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a blonde woman appeared on the television talking about oat milk. She laughed about how obsessed her children were with it. I remember staring at the screen and feeling angry without understanding why. Not because she was wrong. Not because she was cruel. Just because she was speaking from a world that still expected tomorrow.

Across the hospital stood a garden full of pink roses. Someone told me the city planted them because it was the only thing patients could see through their windows. I kept thinking about that. How human it is to place flowers outside a building where people go to die. As if beauty could distract death for a few more minutes.

When you told me you were ready, I misunderstood you. I thought readiness meant surrender. I thought it meant defeat. It took me a long time to understand that neither was true.

You were not ready because you wanted to leave. You were ready because you had carried pain long enough that fear no longer had anything left to threaten you with.

The cruel part was that your readiness belonged only to you. The rest of us were not ready for it. Your readiness sat quietly inside your dimming eyes. Your readiness flickered across a monitor that was slowly forgetting the rhythm of your heartbeat.

Your readiness made perfect sense to you and absolutely none to the people who loved you. Because how were we supposed to agree? We kept bringing tomorrow into the room as if it could help. We kept saying "when you get better" as though repetition could become medicine. We were not ready for your readiness because loving you had convinced us we deserved more time than we were given.

A few days later, I walked past the park in front of the hospital and imagined you standing there with all the others who had once occupied those rooms above us. All holding each other's hands in a long line. All carrying the same readiness.

And on your last breath, I hope they were there with you. I hope someone reached for your hand before the darkness did. I hope they lifted even the smallest ounce from your chest. The weight of leaving people who weren't ready for your readiness.