The Rainbow Was Loud

The Silence Nearly Killed Me.

It’s the end of June.
Pride floats through the air, thirty days of color, joy, celebration.
Parades flood the streets with music and banners, laughter and glitter,
declarations of identity and love.
The world feels loud, expressive, alive.
The loud joys drown the grinding teeth of those who oppose.

But no one asked if I’m okay.
Not once.
Then again, neither did I.
Because men like me… we avoid the talk.

Why?
What makes those four words “Are you really okay?”
feel like a loaded gun in the mouth?
Why do we flinch from softness,
trained to clench our jaws instead of opening our hearts?

I’m a straight man with no neat order to my emotions.
No glitter. No rainbow. No parade.
Just a matte-black aura, blunt, heavy,
like an obsidian orb pulsing quietly in the void it was born in.

Is this me? Or just the mask I learned to wear?

I’ve become an actor in my own life…
No cameras. No lights.
Just a shadowy demon grinning in the corner,
waiting patiently for men like me
to pull the trigger, tie the rope,
pop the bottle or swallow past the warning label.

June is bright,
but my mind is dim.
I rehearse positivity like a ritual.
But when I’m alone, the silence opens.
hinges creaking like a long-forgotten door.

I wonder how many other men hear the whisper:
“Kill yourself.”

79% of suicides are men.
Only 35% seek help before their attempt.

How many hear that soft, steady voice
seeping into thought,
like poison dissolving in a glass of water?
How many choose to drown it out
with something louder… stronger…
a scream, a song, a shot?

Funny, isn’t it?
Some will hear a bang nearby
and it won’t be fireworks lighting up the sky…
but something darker,
burning out the silence inside.

Bang.

In the U.S alone, roughly 100 men die by suicide each day, that more than 36,000 men annually.

The rainbow flutters in the wind
while the red spills down to meet gravity.
Not all red is for pride.
Some of it bleeds out of the silence
we never learned to speak.

It pools in shadows beneath beds,
behind locked bathroom doors,
in the quiet corners of bright rooms
where no one dares to ask.

They cheer for love in the daylight,
but turn their heads at night
when that love collapses
under the weight of being unseen, unheard, un-held.

We are being taught to smile in June
to glitter, to dance, to belong.
But some of us are rain in parade weather,
aching thunder behind forced light.

And when the confetti settles,
who sweeps up the shards
of the ones who felt too gray for the rainbow?

This isn’t a protest of Pride.
It’s a plea for balance.
For 30 days, the world wears its colors proudly
but in that sea of spectrum,
the quiet black hole of men’s pain goes unseen.
We are grieving in silence,
while the volume of celebration drowns out
the muffled screams of those
who don’t know how to shine.

Can’t we hold both truths?
That love is worth celebrating
and that some of us are still learning how to survive it?