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And that my friends is why Pride Month is still so important. Yes, it is about celebration. It is about joy, love, community, and being visible without apology. But it is also about walking for those who cannot. Speaking for those who have been silenced, and standing for those who still live in countries where being LGBTQIA+ is criminalised, punished, or treated as something shameful.

I never had to ask to know— like breath, like pulse, like something pressed deep into bone. It has always lived in me. There was no revelation, no sudden bloom— only the slow untangling of what was always there.

But you look at me like overgrowth, like something unwelcome curling through cracks, roots pushing up through pavement, breaking the lines you traced in stone— unnatural, you say, though it grows all the same.

And I will not apologize for the way I wish to hold her.

You don’t know why it unsettles you— only that it does. That it takes up space where you never meant to leave any.

You mistake my hands for something reaching too far, my mouth for something tainted, because they love gently and without shame. You say love should not feel like this— as if love must bend to your will, must bloom only where you allow.

But love is wild by nature. It does not yield to walls built from fear. It moves in ways you do not expect— it is soft and unshaken, pressing against my ribs and against a body you swore I was never meant to love.

When she looks at me, I feel it like sunlight— heavy and warm where it rests on my chest. You see the way she holds me, and it bothers you, though you cannot say why. Still, you call it unnatural— as if love were a thing to be tamed, as if it needed your permission to exist.

As if the rain asks before it falls. As if the ivy begs before it climbs.

As if I could be anything but this.