Where Light Refuses to Bow

We never asked to be different. We only wanted to walk without folding our souls into apology. To laugh without someone measuring the pitch of our voices and deciding if it was a boy or a girl. To hold a hand without scanning the street like love was a dealer, and we, the addicted. Some greet your heart like a stray: smiling, until it dares too close. Then they kick. But we didn’t break. We stitched dignity from bruises, wrote our names on fogged mirrors with trembling fingers, until one morning, we saw those names and called them sacred. Our skin holds the slurs. Our spines recall nights slept upright, alert, prey even in dreams. We wear color like scars turned holy. We wear love like scripture. We tilt our heads not in shame, but toward heaven, carrying the broken pieces we refused to discard. We don’t march for eyes. We march because we still breathe. Because someone, somewhere, needs proof they can survive the closet, the blade, the therapy, the silence that burns like acid. This is not celebration. This is resurrection. We carry the ghosts: those starved of belonging. We whisper their names like spells to keep the dark at bay, to call that safety. PRIDE is no costume. It’s the raw, unglamorous act of refusing to hate your reflection. And if that’s sin, let us sin Fiercely. Softly. Without apology. Until the sky learns our name.