Not from sadness. From relief.
On the other end, silence. Then the sound of her mother crying. nino haratisvili vos-maa zizn- skacat-
Not the life she had planned. The life that had happened. The one where she loved a woman named Mariam in secret, then shouted it at a family dinner, then watched her grandmother cry and her uncle throw a plate at the wall. The one where she left for Berlin with a suitcase and a half-finished manuscript, where she washed dishes in a Kreuzberg café, where she learned German from old detective novels and the silence of her own loneliness. Not from sadness