The Hug

Abhirup Panja
4 min readSep 8, 2016

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It had been a long day. Gruesome, tiring and overly unhappening. As I strolled through the winding pavements leading to my home I felt the melancholy in the air engulf me. Though it had become a routine for me to walk through these roads everyday thinking about the same thing and feeling the same way, still I felt like today everything was a shade grayer than usual. I couldn’t think of any reason that was causing these bizarre feelings. These feelings felt so familiar yet it had this air of mystery about it that left me a bit jittery. I usually enjoyed surfing through these tides of uncharted feelings but something felt quite off today. Today the sea of feelings felt very peaceful as though trying to convey me a message that I couldn’t fathom. The tranquility in the air was unnerving to me. I blamed these queer feelings to the chemicals in my brain. They were creating a cloud of uneasy haze that made charting through this particular feeling pretty daunting. As I made my way through the gardens laden with daffodils I couldn’t help but let my erratic mind wander away to try and ride the tide of this uncanny feeling. As I tried to focus on making my way to the source of this perplexing feeling I couldn’t zero in on any one. There were way too many variables to solve this problem. The defunct engineer in me tried all its might to reach a rational solution but like the four years in the college put his hands up in anguish at the lack of results. As I was in the final stretch of the garden walkway I tried to think a way out of this precarious feeling. I could now see the dimly lit door to my home laced with a nameplate. As I mulled over various probable solutions, I let my feeble heart make the decision.

I pushed the door I smelled the familiar scent of incandescents coming from the bedroom. Apparently the dose of nicotine hadn’t done me any good. I still had that uncanny feeling which by now I had accepted as a more evolved version of agony and despair mixed in equal proportions. As I stood there lamenting my ill judgement of choosing to overcome the feelings by taking help of nicotine, I saw the most beautiful pair of eyes staring at me across the room. I felt a sudden surge of a mix of feelings in me, as though the chemicals after tormenting me for so long had decided to go berserk leaving me facing these oncoming missiles laden with emotional gunpowder. I felt a mix of embarrassment, tranquility and somewhat happy. As she moved across the room at a relaxed pace she did take a stop, I guess she her nose had sensed the unfamiliar scent in the air. She paused, twitched her nose a bit then continued her steady pace towards me. As she moved closer I could feel this impending emotional flood I was about to face. She moved closer to me and her hands went around me. As she slowly hugged me, apart from her comforting soft hands giving me a sense of security I suddenly felt these balls of tears rolling down my cheeks. It was as though I has lost all control over my lacrimal-glands. I felt like the final piece of the puzzle had fit in and it couldn’t fit better than this. She finally broke the silence, “Kire re, ki hoyeche? Sob theek to?” (“What happened? Is everything fine?”). I replied in a meek voice trying and failing to hide the overwhelming emotional clot in my throat “Ha Ma ekhon sob theek hoye gelo” (“Yeah Mom everything just got right”).

That day I realised the difference a single tight hug from your Mom can bring into your life. That day which seemed as though would end into a rut with me crying myself to sleep, turned out me crying on the strongest shoulder that I could cry on. I rebuked myself for turning to a rolled piece of paper to look for tranquility when I could find peace in the warmth of that magical hug. Moms usually have this unusual ability to make everything right in our lives, even though they don’t know half the problems we are facing or the everyday struggles we go through yet they have this other-worldly ability to mould our emotional state from that of a woeful day to a good nights sleep.

That hug that day convinced me to stop looking for peace in places that people claimed peace could be found and start looking for it in the right places that is in the people whom you love and the people who love you “Unconditionally”

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