I don't hold her hand anymore

or "why does my pride disappear on the street"

I knew I liked girls when I first saw her, four years ago. It all just clicked together, now I knew who I was. We started off as long distance, which gave us beautiful airport reunions and countless first kisses, but also bitter tears and more frustration than I could possibly take. However, we made it work and we've moved in together, if you want the fast forwarded version.

I'll never forget meeting her for the first time, not behind a screen anymore but in real life. How many times I wiped my sweaty hand against my jeans, sweaty because I refused to stop holding her hand for four hours straight. I had never held a girl's hand before, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I was oblivious to others, there wasn't one face in the crowd that didn't seem blurry to me, not even my classmates' who later on outed me at school. I even kissed her goodbye.

Four years later, and everything has changed. We live together, go to uni together, food shop together, go on holiday together. I know everyone in her family, and she almost knows everyone in my over extended one.

And I don't hold her hand anymore.

I see the way people look at us when she holds my arm at the bus stop, when I kiss the top of her head in the line at the post office. It's easy to look away, but it doesn't mean that the growing feeling of discomfort goes away. It stays, slithering in my mind and heart, making me feel like I don't belong anywhere as long as I love my girlfriend. In the same queue as us, kids five years younger than us have been kissing and hugging for the whole time we've been here, and no one has even spared them a look.

We've been called names a few times, too quickly for me to say something back. Otherwise I would have, I've always been shy but hot blooded. But now that I'm writing about it in the light of the Camden bus attack last May, would it be wise to? What's best, be humiliated and hopefully safe, or stand up for myself and get beaten up?

Before I was out to my whole family, I was advised to never hold her hand in public, ever. Now that this kind of disgusting attacks are taking place more often, the advice comes back to me regularly. And I can't help but feel broken by it.

It's not just hand holding, it's so much more than that. It's being able to love, freely. Being myself, at home or in public, without people reacting to it. Even when the reaction is silent, it still hurts.

This is a promise to myself. I'm almost reaching the third decade of my life, and I need to always stay true to who I am if I want to blossom into who I would like to be.

So I will hold her hand, and I will do it proudly. I owe this to the 16 year old I used to be, laughing in the London rain with her girlfriend for the first time, daydreaming about what we now have.