Nadiya Jooma

“No’ might make them angry but it will make you free.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. " I don't understand why they would do that. Can't they see it's a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that."

I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you - but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won't finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“i am mine.
before i am ever anyone else's.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit