Portrait of a Brother

This small A4 sketch is the most painful piece in my personal collection. It is a portrait of my brother, drawn from life in our family home during the heavy, transitional days of spring—the very beginning of the full-scale war.
I was only 19 years old then, still just a young girl, standing on the precipice of an unknown life. A heavy, unspoken truth hung in the air: everyone in my family knew that I would be leaving soon, and that it would likely be forever. Since our families will be separated by different countries.( In such a complex situation). This sketch became my way of bracing for an inevitable goodbye.
I captured him sitting by the window in a sharp, contrasting contre-jour light—a silhouette wrapped in a suffocating silence. The spring outside mirrored our internal state: a raw, painful transition from the warmth of yesterday into the freezing uncertainty of tomorrow.
Today, this drawing is a bittersweet sanctuary. It is a portal to a home I can never return to, and to a family that remains there, far away. Now that I am entirely on my own, this artwork serves as my emotional anchor—a visual fragment of the life I lost, a testament to our shared anxiety, and a monument to a sibling bond that neither distance nor war can ever diminish.