CJ

“And I had to leave you behind.
Not because there was no love
But because there was no growth”
― Billy Chapata, Chameleon Aura

“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men, who look like my father pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
― Sam Levenson

“I realised that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught —not like what I had seen —shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own. This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing — no one interested — no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working on my own, unknown — no one to satisfy but myself.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, Words Works: Volume 1