The hospital room smelled like bleach and ghosts. I held his hand until he didn’t have hands anymore. We were twenty-three and immortal until we weren’t. That was 1985. The city was loud but everyone I loved went quiet, then disappeared. 

Pills rattle in their little orange rooms, but not like they did when blood meant death, when every dose was a countdown, not like counting backwards through bone. Back then, they were lifelines thrown into bloodstreams drowning in viruses—HIV scrawled in every test result like a verdict. Once, they were all we had between diagnosis and a funeral.

We didn’t have time to be saints. We danced on fire escapes and kissed like the world might choke on its own silence—and it did. It did. They called us sinners, but I watched men wash each other’s bodies with trembling hands, like church, like gospel, like grace.

Back then, the nights were louder than lungs, the boys wore bruises like medals, and nobody said the words ‘AIDS epidemic’ unless they whispered it. Nobody said war either, but we knew.

I remember Duane. I remember Michael. I remember the quiet drip of IVs as if they were poetry. We didn’t write love poems, no. We wrote phone trees and obituaries. We wrote wills on napkins with lipstick because sometimes, that was all we had.

And still we danced. Christ, how we danced. T-cells like broken teeth and still we made a church out of each other. A kiss was an act of resistance. A meal, communion. I wore grief like a coat and it was always winter. But someone would still make soup with their own hands shaking. Bathed bodies no one else would touch.

If you want to know why the L comes first, ask the dying. Because they showed up when no one else did. Because the lesbians came with gloves and thread and soup and fierce-eyed love that didn’t blink. They didn't have to—but they did. While the world looked the other way, the girls stitched us back together with their hands and rage. Lesbians buried our dead. The Lesbians learned our names and held us when we shook, and held us still when we didn’t shake anymore.

And we were dying, yes, but we were beautiful.

Listen: We did not survive because we were strong. We survived because we held each other. Because we learned to say I love you like a liturgy and mourned out loud. We refused to let the dead be erased, wrote their names on quilts the size of silence.

And now I walk the world like a ghost, my memory grew teeth, chewing through the past, still tasting the men I loved. The boys who burned too bright.

Some nights I still hear the IV drip like a metronome and I remember that we lived anyway. We threw parties with trembling limbs. We wrote poems that bled. We made families out of ash and defiance.

There is something holy in surviving when the world doesn’t want you to. There is something brutal about remembering who you had to become so you could be here to tell it.

We didn’t die quietly. And we didn’t love quietly either. That’s the story no one writes in history books. But I write it anyway. In my skin. In my breath. In the way I still say his name like a psalm, like a promise, like a prayer that worked.

This is not a happy ending but a flame that never went out. It is a story that begins with the letter L.

- Beatrice Diane D. Bartolome