Status Updates From Der brennende Garten

wth is going on?? i’m not even 100 pages in and this book already has me crying. this has never happened to me before, help😭

“The pages were true, and they did not belong in the book that we had written together. Had she been there, she would not have faulted me. She would have taken my hand in hers and held it, as she had so many times before. But the fingers on the armrest next to me belonged to a stranger. All I had were her words, the stories she had collected and that had been entrusted to me.”

“At the end of a long day, when I permitted myself to think about him, I opened the notebook I had saved for myself, took out my pen, and tried again to take my own history, as I had taken the histories of others. Have you ever been haunted by propaganda? It can be a kind of ghost. I longed for the real and imperfect person I had known. […] I wanted the life on the other side of the war's looking-glass…”