Nur.

At school he was paired up to write letters with a boy in Maun, Botswana: Mansa, an elephant. Mansa sends him drawings; Nur writes back by slipping a flat stone into the envelope — his grandmother once had to explain at the post office that the stone was part of the letter. Once Mansa wrote that he looked like a pineapple with legs, and Nur laughed out loud on his own, a rare thing for him. The friendship with Mansa works precisely because there are eleven thousand kilometres between them and no one asks him to start the conversation. For him, distance is sometimes what makes affection possible.

A cloth bag suits him for exactly that reason: it's the object that hauls things from here to there and back again. Groceries from the market, a drawing for Mansa, the stone on its way to the post office inside an envelope. You sling it over your shoulder, fill it, empty it, and do the same the next day. In the portrait only his gentle face shows, front-facing; whatever's inside stays invisible. If you like how it works, I have the rest of the bags from the collection with other characters from the same family.