I had promised myself two things that night as I climbed through my window and onto the fire escape, the black metal shiny and slick with rain droplets.

First, that I would return in a couple of hours, long before dawn, up the skinny fire escape ladder, through the open window, and tucked back beneath the blankets on my tiny twin mattress, before my mother stumbled her way through the tight halls of the apartment, banging on the walls and checking the rooms like a warden stalking from cell to cell. I would never tell her I left and she would never find out.

The second thing I promised myself was an afterthought, a frantic prayer wretched from quivering lips into a cold and unforgiving night. I had slung my left leg over the rail of the fire escape, let my weight transfèr from my feet to my hands so I could step onto the ladder, but my foot missed the rung. I gave my weight over to the air and panicked, my heart rate speeding up in my ear, pounding as I clung to the slippery rail. I thought I was going to fall. The ground below wasn’t visible in the night- it was tucked beneath towering buildings casting such deep shadows into the already black night that the alley between buildings looked like peek into another dimension entirely, one where light doesn’t exist at all. I shuddered. “I promise to stay out of trouble”, I whispered to myself as I made my way, slowly, down the fire escape ladder.

It wasn't hard to break that first promise. Following my grand escape from the apartment, so much happened. The details from earlier in the night are a blur, those comes back to me in flashes, often on troublesome nights where sleep evades me, but the end- that, I will always remember. I couldn’t tell you how drunk I was that night but I remember I had drifted between multiple bars up and down the streets of the West Village until the lamps burned dim and the sky glowed just the tiniest bit brighter, a sign that the sun would show its face overtop of the towering skyscrapers in a matter of hours. I have no concrete memories of walking up and down the streets that twisted throughout Greenwich Village, and at the time, I had no idea where I was; I was lost and tipsy and totally alone in a foreign part of the city, I didn’t even know what time it was, how long I’d even been out. According to police reports from that night, it was early in the morning, maybe around one am.

I remember being tired, feeling this heaviness in my legs and my head that pulled me towards earth and tugged my eyelids closed, as I trudged down the Avenue South. Eventually, I stopped at Christopher Park, collapsed onto the nearest bench. I closed my eyes for one second, my face turned skyward, and then I was on my knees seconds later, my fingers digging into the dirt as my stomach churned and emptied itself in a puddle of putrid sick that had already began seeping into the ground. The sight and smell made me retch, and I felt the bile in the back of my mouth trying to force its way out.

I crawled away from the puddle and laid down on the grass underneath this lone skinny tree. My mind was slowly clearing now, the drunken haze subsiding as I pressed the heels of my palms against my closed eyes, trying to stay calm and trying to avoid vomiting again. I was grateful for the darkness and the empty streets, there was no one around to see me like this. Pathetic. Sick. Tired.

In the distance, a siren wailed, and I remember that as it faded, this pounding in my head, this steady, constant beat, filled the silence in its stead. I’d never experienced anything like this, where the throbbing had its own sound that I could hear in my ears,  like it was music on a record player, just playing on loop in my brain. I sat up, and instantly, it was gone.

I laid my head back onto the ground and found that the pounding was back, although this time, it sounded different, it had a new rhythm. When I sat up again, I shook my head, trying to wake myself up, convinced I was just hearing things because I was tired and really drunk. But when I stilled, I felt the pounding in my hand this time, a pulse between my fingers. Whatever the pounding was, it wasn’t the result of night of excessive drinking. I looked to where my hand rested on the ground, the very tips of grass blades peeking out between my fingers. The dirt shifted and pebbles shook, the slightest tremors. Is it coming from the ground?

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I answered aloud.

I picked myself up from the grass and brushed the dirt off of my clothes as I looked around at the park. It was a small, triangle shaped area of trees and benches wedged between streets, Grove street to the south, 4th Street to the west, and Christopher street to the north. I remember spinning around in circles, eyes closed, whispering numbers. On the count of ten, I stopped spinning, and picked the street I was facing, hoping it would get lucky and discover the source of the pounding.

That’s how I found myself wandering down Christopher Street. I don’t remember how long I walked for, and I don’t really remember the walk itself. What I do remember, clear as the present day, was the sign, this big long T protruding from the front of this stout building sandwiched between towering apartments. I remember reading the letters as I neared the building, eyes fixed on the fading print.

“Stonewall Inn.”

There was this sign in the window, but I don’t quite remember what it said; I was drawn to the glass, but I looked right past the sign and into the bar. I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black, like someone had boarded up the window from the inside, and I couldn't hear any music. Surely, this couldn’t be the place I was looking for.

Except, I couldn’t walk away. Maybe something in my heart told me to knock on the door, or maybe my curiosity. Either way, I stayed. I brought my hand to the iron door and knocked- slowly, three times. One, two, three. I waited. I was sure no one would answer- I hadn’t seen anyone inside and I hadn’t heard any music - and I started to think the door would never open.

Then, suddenly, the iron creaked, and I saw it; the glimpse of light, a flash of purple bursting out, only to get snuffed in a fraction of a second. But it had been enough. I knocked again. This time, the door opened, and, without hesitation, I went inside.

I was expecting the bar to be mostly empty, but the moment that door clicked into place behind me, I realized just how packed it was. Men and women, black and white mixed together, kings and queens pressed tightly together from wall to wall, all clutching the same drinks, all wearing the same tipsy, grins, swaying to the music.

The music I’d felt in Christopher Park. I’m definitely in the right place.

I made my way through the crowd, towards the back, near the bathrooms and the bar. Someone clapped me on the shoulder and another man with lipstick on his cheek hugged me. It was weird, but It didn’t feel strange. There was this energy in Stonewall that was hard to place then but I think it just had this welcoming atmosphere that made me feel safe and loved in a way I never had anywhere else, even at home. I remember an older woman wearing men’s trousers hopped up from her barstool and offered it to me, tipping her cocktail in an almost mini salute. She disappeared into the crowd. 

I don’t remember ordering a drink from the bartender but somehow I ended up nursing a beer for at least ten minutes.

On the stage behind me, people were singing and performers were stealing laughs and applause from the audience. I remember I caught the eye of this one queen, at least six feet tall, wearing this purple dress. Her cheeks were red and her makeup was smudged around her left eye. She winked at me, and I grinned at her, and then she went back to entertaining the crowd and I went back to emptying my glass. I just couldn’t believe how friendly people were being to me. I’d never been in a bar like this before, where there weren’t just angry men trying to cop a feel in the darkness. Stonewall was packed like most other bars, maybe even more so, but it didn’t feel like I was suffocating surrounded by all of those people , drowning in a sea of drunkenness. Being in stonewall was refreshing and fun. Instead of drunk, people were tipsy, they were giggly, bubbly. Happy. I could stay right here forever.

Then the door burst open, and the loud bang when the iron hit the wall startled me, and I dropped my beer into my lap. Around me, people sighed and groaned, a chorus of “not this again,” and “are you kidding me” echoing throughout the bar. They weren’t afraid, though, and that kept me calm. Something was happening at the front of the bar, and people were leaving in single file lines. Some people who were in the back of the bar with me went into the bathrooms, and that was when I started to get nervous. Why were so many people leaving? What’s going on? 

Suddenly, there was shouting outside the bar, and people inside exchanged puzzled looks. I turned to the woman standing closest to me, clutching at the hem of her dress, as if she was trying to pull it down over her knees. Her lipstick was smudged on her teeth from biting her lip. She was sweating. She was scared.

“Are you alright, ma’am?”

She shook her head. “There wasn’t ‘posed to be one tonight. There ain’t usually shoutin’. Somethin’s wrong, somethin’s gone wrong.”

I lost sight of her when the shouting turned into screaming, coming from the front of the bar this time. People were pushing past me now, trying to get to the bathrooms. I couldn’t see through the crowds, but I could hear boots pounding on the bar floor. I forced my way through to the nearest wall, just to get a clear view of the comotion. Big mistake. Before I even knew what was happening, I was being grabbed and I was being yanked forward and then I was being thrown out of the bar. Someone shoved me to the ground, pressed my cheek into the asphalt, put their boot on the back of my head, holding me in place. I remember opening my mouth to cry out, but I was drowned out by the screams of others around me and the wailing of police sirens. I remember being handcuffed and dragged to a car’s back tire on the other side of the street just across from the bar. From there, once my head stopped throbbing, I could see everything clearly.

Initially, I thought we were swarmed with cops, outnumbered ten to one. Instead, the opposite was true, and I only counted ten as I watched them storm into the bar, come out with patrons, hands twisted behind their backs, before cuffing them, tossing them aside, and then running back inside to arrest more. Around me, patrons, angry and resigned, sat in the back of cop cars, lied bruised in the middle of the road, kneeled on the sidewalk in cuffs. Police officers radioed for backup, extra wagons to take as many patrons as they could to jail. Somewhere behind me, a far off siren wailed, and I remember wondering if those extra officers were already on their way.

I guess I’ve become a breaker of promises tonight, I lamented as I shifted around on the ground, trying to get comfortable around these cuffs that were cutting into my wrists, leaving them marked with blue and black that would last for days, though they were sore for even longer. I’d never been arrested before, but I knew enough to know that there would be no returning home before sunrise. I imagined my mother getting the call that her daughter had been arrested, imagined her anger and her disappointment. Then I realized that they’d have to tell where they arrested me. A bar in the middle of Greenwich Village, at one in the morning. She’s going to kill me. They’re going to find my body washed up in the Hudson. I leaned my head against the car and grimaced, wishing I could blink and be back in my room, simply waking from a terrible nightmare.

And then I saw her. I sat up.

She was tall, and she was wearing a dark suit. I caught her eye as she approached the car beside the one I was sitting against. Even though she was being arrested, she looked so regal, so above it all, like she was being led to a carriage rather than a cop car. But then one officer hit her crown with his baton, and another kicked her, and she went down, hard, just a few feet away from me, and the regality faded, and I saw blood trickling down the side of her face. The officers were shouting something at her, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sirens. I watched her pull herself to her feet, wipe the blood away with her suit sleeve. One officer gestured to the ground, and she spit where he pointed. Another officer shoved her and she stumbled forward but this time, she didn’t fall. She whirled around and shouted something at him; he lifted his baton. A crack rang through the air.

She hit him, punched him right in the face. The crack was his nose, broken as his cries lifted up into the sky and his blood dripped down onto the asphalt. In the many decades since Stonewall’s opening, in the hundreds of routine police raids, no one had ever done that- no one had ever fought back. They’d just accepted that their lives were raids and arbitrary arrests and unjust violence. I guess this woman had finally had enough; I looked in her eyes and I didn’t see fear- I just saw anger.

The cop was shocked, and he stood there holding his jaw, looking to the other officers in stunned silence. None of them knew what to do, and the fear in their eyes was real, and it danced in their pupils beneath fluttering lids and lashes as they blinked in disbelief. The woman in the suit had made the first move, planted it squarely on the face of one of their own, and they were waiting for someone to make the second. They didn’t have to wait long. The suited woman shouted something that was mostly drowned out by the onslaught of sirens as the fourth, fifth, sixth, and ninth district precinct officers arrived on scene, but we all caught her last words.

“Why don't you guys do something?” 

I watched the woman get dragged into a patrol wagon, but by then, it was too late for the police officers to stop what she had started.

Blue and red swarmed the black night as Christopher street exploded into chaos. Patrons came running out of the bar to join the fray as those outside who weren’t handcuffed began attacking the police officers. They used whatever they could find, bricks and garbage cans and bottles and cocktail glasses and fists all flying to the tune of police sirens, Someone was shouting the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome”, and this one man sitting beside me started humming along. One of the patrons had shattered the glass of a cop car window and began unlocking people’s cuffs with the key he’d found inside. He unlocked mine, but he had disappeared before I could thank him, had already run off to free more people.

Everything from that point on was a blur- there was just so much happening all at once. Police officers running around with batons, swinging and shouting and crying out for help, patrons from Stonewall fighting with every ounce of strength they had and throwing anything within reach. Someone lit a bar two doors down from Stonewall on fire, and the glow of the burning fire cast light on the rioters, allowing me to see everyone clearly. I noticed that the group had nearly tripled in size- it was no longer just the patrons of Stonewall Inn. Homeless people, people from the apartment next door, queens, kings, and other patrons from bars nearby, had all joined in. There were so many people- far too many for the police to handle. They formed a phalanx in an attempt to protect themselves from and push back against the rioters, but soon they were the ones retreating, chased down Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. It was this glorious moment of prey rising up against the predator, and I think everyone who was there felt the same. For so many people, this was long overdue.

I don’t remember exactly when the riot died down, but one moment everyone was marching and shouting and the next, the streets were nearly empty- save for a number of abandoned patrol wagons and buggies- and the sky was lighter and birds were waking up, a sign that morning was on its way. There were small groups of people who lingered on Christopher Street, standing among piles of shattered glass and trash, and I merely waved to them as I began heading towards 4th street, back to my apartment. I’d already broken both of the promises I’d made that night, but I could still try to make it home before my mother woke up. I figured if I hurried, I’d make it on time. 

As I started walking down Christopher Street, something in my heart told me to turn around. Told me not to leave yet. For some reason, I listened, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw the woman in the suit form earlier, the one who’d punched the cop, and she was sitting on a curb with some other people I recognized from Stonewall. One of the women waved to me, and I just couldn’t walk away then. 

I jogged over to them.

“Nice to meet you,” the woman who waved me over said, smiling warmly. “I’m Diana. Sorry to bother you, I just remember seeing you in Stonewall.”

She turned to the people beside her. “Apparently, a bunch of people from the Inn are meeting in Christopher Park to discuss our next move. There’s been talks about the likelihood of another riot tomorrow night.” Diana turned back to me. “Would you like to join us?”

I didn’t hesitate. I nodded. 

“Absolutely.”

And then we were walking down 4th street, heading for Christopher Park. I remember at one point, the woman in the suit was walking beside me, and I turned to her. 

“I think what you did was really brave. Also that punch was amazing.”

She chuckled. “Thanks, doll. But all I did was defend myself. When a bully hits you, you hit back, and I don’t care if the bully is a cop, I’m going to swing, especially if he hits me first.”

We continued talking until we arrived at the park. I could already see the people waiting for us, see the blood on their torn and dirty clothes. The smell of smoke lingered on them, probably on me as well, because of the fire. Many of them stood underneath the hornbeam and maple trees, while some sat in the grass, all of them broken but none of them destroyed. I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish, what they thought would come from fighting the patrol force, maybe even all of the NYPD, but still they were determined. They had hope.

I remember looking up at the sky, yellow and pink spilling out, chasing the black away as light blue flooded in. I remember smiling. There was no use even trying to run home now. I’d have to take my chances with the Hudson and the warden later on, but in that moment, I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. I might as well stick around, help these people out with their revolution. 

As we passed under the arch of the park’s entry, I realized I didn’t know the name of the woman in the suit.

“I don’t think I caught your name.”

She stopped walking and spun on her heel. She extended her hand to me, and I remember thinking she looked more regal than she had when she was being led out of the bar. This was also the first time I’d seen her smile.

“I’m Stormé.”