A Hug

October 2026

For D. - Maybe one day

I thought I knew who you were. Then I feared I did not. Then I feared I did.

But I realized:

How could I mistake the way you hugged me, the way you folded me into your arms so desperately tightly into a cocoon, so soft and hard that whatever words you said to a teary eyed girl dissolved into a fog around the ocean of your embrace -

how could I mistake that for knowing you?

You and I, as us, so far, are nothing more than those few fleeting moments.

But life gives us strange, similar gifts over and over again.

When I was a very little girl there was a young woman just a few years older than me. Her name was Amy. Amy was brunette, blue eyed, gorgeous, strong and kind: she pointed me tough and true. Amy raised me and her little sister, (3 months younger than me), the first 13 years of my life. She was my sister and my mother. My friend.

Amy was my first encounter of a feminine creature. She slept in a room decorated by her sensible Victorian aesthetic. In this room she had an armoire containing drawers filled with garter belts made of bow tied ribbon suspenders cascading down, meant to snap onto silky, sheer, skin tight stockings to hold thin material in a place where the flesh of a leg rises above the knee and curves inwards, upwards, towards more flesh, soft and silky.

Still even more in the drawers of that armoire, there were satin burgundy panties called thongs, and then even more delicate lace-like-mysteries to me, because Amy said every young woman should feel beautiful, but some things were meant to be between a man and his wife.

Amy had no shame but I surely did; even her perfect heart shaped lips she stained with dark rose red were a sin.

When Amy was 20, she was taken to the hospital. Her stomach was pumped, after her fiancé, her first love, fucked her and came on her and told her she was disgusting. I was 14. She refused to eat or talk to anyone for over a month. An empty stomach pumped with liquid food to keep her alive. No one ever hugged or held as tight and strong and safe as Amy held and hugged people. Ever. Everyone who knew Amy, knew this. No one hugged like Amy hugged: A massive star pulling you into her orbit, a sphere of gravity gathering all of you up, filling the enormous places inside of you, where God forgot to close the spaces between a few atoms.

One day, decades later, you hugged me. How could you have known that your every embrace would take me home, whole and held in the hearth of my own spirit? Any more than I could think: I Know You.