When You Left, A part of Me Left With You.

It’s challenging to articulate the feelings associated with losing someone dear. What I do understand—and what is straightforward for me to explain—is the emptiness I experienced almost right after my mother passed away. That emptiness remains, even nearly a year later. I’ve learned to live with it; I realize it won’t disappear, just as I won’t completely recover from my sorrow. These are the remnants—wounds of the spirit far too raw to ever fully heal.

I also recognize that the person I once was will never come back. Initially, I thought it was typical to feel different—that it was merely the course of grief. Now I understand that this is my new identity. A fragment of me perished with you.

Returning to drawing has been incredibly difficult; my inspiration vanished—perhaps because everything earthly seems trivial to me now. Then I glanced up and noticed the sky and the clouds. I thought of you, Mom; I reassured myself that maybe you were observing me from time to time, from your place. Thus, I aimed to illustrate those skies, those clouds—everything that helps me escape the weight of the earth and that dull pain that remains. I wanted to venture even further, into space—that realm which has captivated me since my childhood—to explore beyond even that, attempting to flee the sadness that, I fear, will be my companion until my very last moment.

Hence, I paint skies, I draw space, I immerse myself in the boundless.

Occasionally, I return to the earth a bit—portraying oceans—before venturing off again into the vastness of the universe, into the skies, into everything beyond this planet. To me, the earth now feels somewhat too trivial and sordid—with all of us little humans, our miserable hatreds, and our exhausting anger.

I escape into my digital canvases and paint to suppress the black hole expanding within me.