Laekan Zea Kemp

Set in the Monte Vista neighborhood of San Antonio and told in alternating voices, teenaged musicians Aarón and Mia grow close as they share and struggle to overcome the emotional pain of their troubled home lives.

Heartbreak Symphony

If you're a burnt-out musician clap your hands 👏👏

Making music is like summoning a ghost. Play the right melody, strike the right chords, and people remember the past with their whole bodies. What it felt like to fall in love for the first time. What it felt like to have that heart you never knew could be so big, broken.

The right song sinks its teeth in us and makes us feel in places we thought were numb. The right song hangs us high above the clouds and makes us dream.

I didn't tell her that our hearts now carried the same scar.

Because my songs are not a symphony and nothing I've made will catch the world on fire.

And the hardest part is that Doubt does not lie. It just doesn't tell the whole truth.

... that's what happens when you're a great storyteller. Once the story has a life of its own, there's no making you disappear.

Passions should come with a blaring red warning.

Because what he didn't say is that before the dreams can carry me, I have to be able to carry them first. And they're 

... the most beautiful things die twice. A star imploded but it isn't gone. When the light finally disappears, that's when a thing really dies.

So the key to cheating death, the key to living forever, is to make enough light that 

"A speaker for your soul. The soul goes in through the mouthpiece and comes out the other end as sound."

I wonder what the difference is between DNA and destiny. They're both signatures, road maps, a way of marking where you've been and where you're going. But are they both things you're not allowed to choose?

He didn't know how to carry them both. How to exist in a world where both things are true. 

Two notes in the same song, each taking the lead in different moments of our lives; other times tangling themselves up into chaos. White noise that makes us forget that life was ever a song to begin with.

Heartbreak Symphony quotes

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