The Perils of Hugging in the 4th Dimension

A child has a strange experience while hugging his mother.

I was young, young enough to still be getting used to hugs. I didn't quite have the hang of it. My hug-training was buffeted by numerous setbacks. On one particular occasion I accidentally hugged a stranger. I was on holiday with my family and we were walking through a town when a sudden storm started up out of nowhere. The storm arrived like a drunken uncle barging in through the back door. It ran straight up to the attic and started searching frantically for something related to its past amidst decades-worth of forgotten junk. The rain fell like clear, scentless diarrhoea so we went under the eaves of a cinema entrance with a lot of strangers and waited, watching the rain fall against the streetlights whose light was reflected in puddles that got perpetually deeper and wider. There was a roar of thunder that felt like a tiger had placed a walkie-talkie into my body and was trying to get hold of me from a far away jungle. I suddenly leapt for the comforting, human-pillow-like figure of what I thought was my mother, but which turned out to be a stranger who was wearing similarly dark clothing. The stranger I hugged must have wondered what she had done to deserve this show of intimacy from out of nowhere, of a kind that can only ever exist between a mother and her son. In no other hug is the pressure applied in just the right places and with just the right amount of firmness and tenderness. A father/daughter hug has the same quality, but for some reason, father/son hugs and mother/daughter hugs always have something missing. While my face was buried in the bosom of a lady I didn't know, I heard a voice call my name from behind me. I looked around. It was my mother. My actual mother, standing there like a phantom. My arms around the stranger, arms that thought they were hugging my mother, while my eyes were looking at my mother mother; for a split second I existed in a motherless dimension. Now, every time I hug someone, I have to stop mid-hug to check that I am hugging the person I originally intended to hug as the storm of that night comes back to me and that I feel in that exposed motherless moment, which, when you think about it, isn't really a hug at all.

Reviews

[Chaz Hemsworth]

Quite funny at some points. But also at the same time definitely makes me think abouts hugs. The way you put all this thoughts into hugs is incredible.