Honestly, I don’t know why I waited so long to go to Pride. Ok, that isn’t true. I know because until recently I didn’t think I was anything but straight (today the idea of being otherwise makes me laugh, but what can I say, I was a sweet summer child and I knew nothing, just like Jon Snow), and that’s one reason. Then I was ashamed. Then I was too young to go anywhere without telling my parents. Then I was busy with university classes and exams. I arrived at twenty-one years of age always staying at home during Pride Month. Finally, I started working for Bossy and in rode a new wave of realization, awareness, and empowerment. Suddenly there were no more excuses.
So, I pimped my pride t-shirt (with Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s words that love is love is love is love). I tried — and failed miserably — to put glitter in my hair; I scooped up water and every face paint I had in my house; I got on a train that for some strange astral alignment was not hot despite the summer weather. After an hour of inevitable Game of Thrones references, the small group from Turin arrives in Milan Centrale, proceeds to get lost, says very countryside stuff about how everything’s so much bigger and that ‘it’s not like I’m an expert, I don’t know Milan at all‘, and in the end manages to find the beginning of the parade. Colors on already sticky skin, flags, glitter, and we’re off.
Describing how it felt to be there marching, with a Bossy banner no less, is something I can’t put into words. It was the feeling of belonging and rightness like I’ve never felt before in my life. The feeling that ‘it’s right here right now with these people that I’m supposed to be and nowhere else in the universe‘. It’s looking around and seeing people smiling, dancing, and holding hands, but it’s also the will to resist, to fight, to continue to be heard and seen. It’s being able to show my bare arms without feeling bad about it, me, the who has never been comfortable with her own body. It’s another girl winking at me and me proceeding to turn bright red like a fourteen-year-old. It’s pride, pure and simple, and now that I’ve tasted it and taken a deep breath I won’t ever forget it for as long as I live.
It’s also the light chatting, the Snapchats and the selfies, the gelato eaten after while sitting on the grass, stickers attached to my shirt, the sprint through the subway to arrive to the train station on time. It’s sitting on the train with legs that can’t stand anymore and the desperate need to take a shower that combats that of Daenerys Targaryen in season 2 of GoT. The fatigue and sweat are just details that add to the already incredible memories, like the arrival of the march under the stage and the speeches and the music and the group of Sailor Scouts that was dancing close to us and that we saw again on the metro.
An afternoon that came and went like a dream. It was something much, much different than my little town in the Po Valley. And when you come back, to that little town in the Po Valley, you stuck your head under a cold shower and wash it all away — the sweat, the glitter, the face paint, and the writing on your hands. But not the pride. That can’t be washed away. It’s a part of you that has changed, that doesn’t trail away with water or disappears with the reality of everyday life. It stays inside you and from one brick that it was becomes a tower, a castle, a fortress.
I imagine a rainbow flag waving in the air from the mast of the fortress. The same flag that I will be holding at Pride next year. Until we meet again.
