First Freedom

by Sushanth Shyamsundar

Image credit: Dennis Zhang on Unsplash

The first time I felt free, nothing spectacular happened,

which is how I knew it was real.

No anthem. No mountain. No airport scene.

No shirt billowing in slow motion against a sky

that had finally understood my suffering.

Just a street in the evening and my body walking

beside people who did not ask it to explain the way it moved.

We were laughing at something stupid,

Thank God, because joy must sometimes enter

dressed like nonsense or I will not let it in.

Someone bought tea. Someone cursed the heat.

Someone said, come fast, bastard.

And I did. I came alive.

I came without checking my wrists,

my voice, my face, my walk, my hunger,

my missing appetite, my good boy posture,

my bad boy mouth, my whole fucking visa

to the world of normal people.

For once, my body did not feel like a document being verified.

It was only a body. Sweating. Hungry. Loud.

Loved in public by people who did not

need to know everything to make space.

Do you know what freedom is?

Not escape. Escape still remembers the cage.

Freedom is when the cage forgets your address.

For one evening, the cage forgot.

The road opened its oily mouth. The shops glowed.

The dogs slept like monks. The sky turned the colour of an old cinema.

Someone’s bike refused to start.

Someone laughed so hard they bent over

a parked scooter and became useless to society.

And I stood there, queer, ace, strange, unexplained,

unfixed, untranslated, and nobody died of it.

Nobody corrected the air.

Nobody dragged my joy into court.

Nobody said, but what are you really?

I was really there.

That was all.

That was THE miracle.

Not healed, chosen, complete.

Just there,

with my bastard friends,

in the stupid gold of evening,

feeling the world loosen its hand from my throat.

For the first time,

I did not want another life.

I wanted tea.

I wanted the joke to continue.

I wanted the whole ridiculous planet

to shut the fuck up

and let me have this.

***

Sushanth Shyamsundar

Sushanth Shyamsundar is an Indian writer and poet based in Chennai. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amsterdam Quarterly, The Write Launch, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere, and his poem “What the Field Kept” won the 2026 Art on the Trails Poetry Prize. He performs spoken word as Rakshasan, a masked alter ego built for the stranger, louder, and more mischievous corners of his writing. He is the founder of Rakshasan Media.