I don't know what it is about me that makes people, usually my mother, want to hug me. I'm very open about my disdain for physical contact with people, so why there are strangers that just wander up to me and want to wrap their arms around me I have no idea. I think there's some cosmic joke being played on me, and I really don't think it's as funny as the rest of the universe appears to. I'm not even that approachable a person, so these people need to step off already.
Long before Amelia came into my life and trapped me behind a counter waiting for a hug, there was another girl. This girl went to high school with me, and I had never had any interaction with her whatsoever until the morning that she demanded a hug.
Waiting for my school bus in the morning was an arduous task. We had to stand around in the darkened parking lot of the local high school at 6:30 in the morning, and it was usually freezing. We would all huddle together and, even though we had nothing to say that early in the morning, we would talk just to keep ourselves warmer. Usually the huddled masses would be groups of friends, but, sometimes, a freelancer would wander up into a group and just sort of hang around the outskirts in order to soak up other people's body heat and keep from dying from exposure.
One morning I found myself alone. I was alone because none of my friends had shown up for the bus yet; a few of my friends were just running later than usual, a few had had an impromptu house party the night before and wouldn't wake up in time to make it to the bus stop, and others were sick or just skipping class.
So I wandered up to a small group of students and just sort of stood near them, not really listening to what they were saying, and just hoping that the bus would arrive soon so I could sit down and fall back to sleep.
My wandering mind was ripped back to reality when some short loud girl turned to me asking "what do YOU think?" I stared at her blinking for a moment, and then asked her what she was talking about. Apparently I had walked over to the one group of people awake enough to have a lively debate about something, and had no idea what they were talking about or what side I was supposed to be on. I also can't remember what the debate was about, I just know that, in the end, I was on the same side as the short loud girl.
She continued on arguing with her friends, and I would offer the occasional grunt of agreement whenever someone would look my way, but I kept surveying the area for any signs of my own friends.
For whatever reasons, the buses arrived before any of my friends did, but even so they offered me an out from my situation. As I wandered away toward my bus, the short loud girl stepped directly in my way saying "WELL?" I stared at her a moment and asked "...well what?" Her response? "Well, do I get a hug?"
I figured the only way I could get to my bus faster would be to hug her, so I did, and I wandered away.
I would eventually find out that her name was Amy. Likely short for Amelia. COINCIDENCE? No.
I have several theories that lead me to the conclusion that the loud, short Amy that forced a hug from me that day grew to become the elderly Amelia of a few years later.
The first is that Amy suffered from a delayed form of progeria that only affected her after high school (and hit her hard).
The other, and far more likely, theory is that the hug I gave Amy was the most satisfying hug of her life. She grew elderly remembering that moment between us as something magical, and eventually decided that she needed to track me down and hug me again. Unfortunately, by that time, I was long dead, so she invented a form of time-travel, hoping to go back to the day that she and I hugged at the bus stop, but missed by a few years and found herself wandering around town hugging people until she eventually found me.
Little did she know I had learned my lesson from this morning and was willing to use my mother as a human shield.
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