We arrive at dusk, that liminal time when the light is dying but darkness hasn't fully taken over. Roxy moves through the cemetery like she's visiting old friends. Stops at graves, reads the faded inscriptions, photographs the way time has transformed grief into something else.
"Look at this one," she says, kneeling beside a family plot. "Mother, father, three children. All died within two years of each other. 1947 to 1949."
"War?"
"Probably. Or disease. Starvation." She traces the mother's name with her finger. "They're all together though, that's something."
"You think about that? Being together after?"
She looks up at me, her eyes serious. "I think about us being together. However that looks."
"We will be."
"Promise?"
"Baby, you’re never gonna be rid of me."
She stands and kisses me, soft and tender.
"I want to draw them," she says. "The family. The way they're still together even in death."
She sits on the wet grass and starts working. I stand nearby, watching the cemetery entrance, making sure we're alone. The wind picks up, cold and sharp, carrying the smell of approaching rain. Roxy doesn't seem to notice as she's lost in the work, her pencil moving across paper, capturing the family plot and the poetry of death.
"Do you think they knew?" she asks after a while. "That they'd all end up here together?"
"Maybe.”
She works for another hour, creating four new pieces of the family plot, individual headstones, the way moss and time have transformed grief into beauty, a wide shot of the cemetery at dusk that looks like a painting.
When she's done, the rain starts. Just a drizzle at first, then it comes down harder so we run back to the car.
"I love you," she says quietly when we get inside the car.
"I know."
"Say it back."
"I love you. More than anything."
"Good. Don't forget it."
"Never."
The Soviet apartment complex in Marzahn is our last hunt.
It's massive, a brutalist concrete monolith that stretches for blocks, built during East Germany's communist era and abandoned after reunification. The kind of place that was meant to house thousands, but now sits empty, a monument to failed ideology.
We arrive at midnight. The complex is dark except for a few broken streetlights casting orange pools on cracked pavement.Inside, the hallways stretch endlessly. Identical doors, identical walls, identical emptiness. The smell is concrete dust and mold and something else, maybe it’s the residue of lives lived and abandoned.
Roxy photographs methodically. The repetition of doors, the way decay has made each identical unit somehow unique, the graffiti left by urban explorers and squatters.
In one apartment, we find a child's toy, a small wooden horse, hand-carved, sitting on a windowsill like someone just set it down and forgot to come back.
Roxy picks it up carefully, turning it over in her hands.
"Someone made this," she says. "Carved it by hand and gave it to their child."
"And then left it behind."
