damla

“I dance to breathe but often I dance until I’m breathless and sweaty and I can feel all of me, all those parts of me I can’t always feel, I don’t feel like I’m allowed to. It’s my space. I make a little world for myself, and I live.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You’re like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“There was a time when all I wanted in the world was Bank Street. I didn’t call it that, I called it wanting to be a ballet dancer. I failed at both. But I’m not that girl anymore, and her dreams are no longer my dreams. Why should I feel like I failed her?
I’m not that girl anymore.
Oh, she’s still there.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning