When a Show Unfurls Its Wings and Lets My Spirit Breathe
I don’t usually say this out loud, but sometimes when the opening credits are rolling, when the actors’ faces flicker across my screen and the theme song presses gently at the base of my neck, I find myself holding my breath. Like maybe—just maybe—tonight will be the night a show remembers someone like me. I mean really remembers. The way you remember the smell of your grandma’s favorite lotion, or your first heartbreak, or your own name floating from your mother’s lips in a room crowded with kin and gossip and the low hum of something fried on the stove. I’ve gotten good at shrinking my hunger for that kind of remembering. But tonight, watching the new episode of *That Show* (the one with the Black gay character who is all honeyed laugh, sharp tongue, and untucked vulnerability), that hunger reared up inside me, untamed and bossy and loud.
He—let’s call him Micah, because why not—walks onscreen and the air inside my living room shifts. He is impossible to ignore, the way a pebble in your shoe demands attention, only this ache is sweet and new. Micah’s laugh falls out of his mouth crooked, the way I used to laugh before I learned to double-check the room for safety. Before I knew that sometimes even laughter has teeth. He wears his queerness not as armor, but as a set of wings—gaudy, shiny, sometimes awkward, always bright. Gold hoops and pink nail polish and a voice that slides all over the place, high when he’s teasing, low when he softens.
I don’t want to cry because a man I’ve never met gets to show up in the world like that, but there it is—a small, hot ache riding up behind my eyes, deeper than envy, closer to longing, almost like communion.
I think about all the rooms in which I’ve shrunk: between my mother and her church fans on Sunday, in the hallway after ninth period, hips tucked tight, and in my old apartment in Atlanta when my father called to remind me that God does not love the boys who love like I love. My body learned to make itself small, to fit into the airless spaces between sermons and side-eyes, to laugh at the right jokes, to keep wrists still, not to touch softness for too long. But watching Micah? Watching him flit through a grocery store scene, arguing with his grandmother about how much okra to buy for the gumbo, I feel the walls inside me shift and groan. Something hungry, something wounded, stirs and wishes.
He slips up beside his homeboy—who is all jawline and gold grill, the kind of masculinity that makes me clench and ache—and Micah says, “Boy, you wish you had half this flavor,” with a wink and a little hip sway, and nothing bad happens. The laugh track doesn’t turn mean. The camera doesn’t cut away in embarrassment. Nobody dies.
How small a thing to ask for—safety in the mundane, softness allowed to breathe. And yet, I marvel. My body, my heart, this brown queer thing I do every day, didn’t know it was holding its breath until the show let me exhale.
I want to climb into the screen and sit at their kitchen table, set down some real sweet tea, and just watch them love each other out loud. It ain’t perfect. Sometimes the writing stumbles into “Yas queen!” nonsense and I roll my eyes so hard the ancestors feel it, but damned if it doesn’t still feel like a birthday gift: a seat at the family table I spent so long pretending not to need.
Sometimes I pause the TV and walk around my apartment, heart beating strange in my chest. I run my hand along my arm, squeeze the soft at my waist, remember all those years I thought my body would always betray me. I think of the men I’ve loved, the ones who flinched when I reached for their hands in public, whose mothers looked at me too long, too closely. My first boyfriend, who used to trace circles on my back in the church parking lot, shivering hard, even in July. We watched sitcoms together on a laptop, headphones splitting the sound. Nobody on those shows looked like us or loved like us, unless the punchline was how easy we broke. I remember how we’d mute the screen, stare at each other, let the silence be our own audacious soundtrack.
Watching Micah, I ache for that boy. The one I was and the one I loved, living on the edges of the frame, mouths brimming with secrets and fresh hope. I ache—but I don’t break. Not like before. The show makes me want to call him and say, “Can you believe it? They put us on TV and let us smile.” As if the world finally remembered we exist somewhere other than their fears.
There’s a scene where Micah’s family gathers after church. They’re all talking too loud, clanking glassware, showing up in all their layered glory. His grandmother grabs his face, kisses his cheek, and says, “Ain’t nothing wrong with being different, long as you carry it honest.” I clutch my own face, surprise myself by laughing out loud, startled by the sound—the old, round joy of it. Honest. That’s the thing, isn’t it? The slow and trembling work of being honest about who I am, here in this soft Black queer body that refuses to shrink anymore.
I laugh. I cry. I yell at the screen because sometimes the dialogue stumbles, or Micah forgives too quickly, or someone says something that sounds like my uncle at a fish fry, and I am yanked back to a South both brutal and beloved. But even in my ranting, I stay. I watch. I breathe.
This is not salvation. It’s TV. Tomorrow I’ll still have to walk into rooms that don’t see me, or if they do, pretend not to. My mother will still pray, my father will still groan. Atlanta’s skyline will glitter with distant promises. But for tonight, I am allowed to be both full and soft. Allowed to laugh, out loud, at a joke that knows the secret language of my body. Allowed to see a boy like me, wings unfurled, making space for his own messy joy.
I sit on the edge of my old thrifted couch, bare feet pressed into cool pine floorboards, and let my spirit breathe. It is a small freedom, but it is mine. And tonight, that is enough.