Summer Heat and Being Held Together
The summer heat is as intense a sense memory as they come for me. Today it was 94º in New York City, and I’m sure most people hated it, but not me. When I feel intense sweltering heat—the kind that rises up from the pavement and settles on your shoulders and permeates your un-air-conditioned apartment in the late afternoon—it reminds me of all the good things in my childhood. It reminds me of eating watermelon in the front yard with my cousins, burying our faces all the way to the rind. It reminds me of getting in the backseat of my mom’s beat up car after school when it was absolutely baking in there, of coming out of the air conditioned town library into the sun and getting goosebumps from the sudden temperature change. It reminds me of summers at the lake, of afternoon thunderstorms that you could set your watch by, of insanely delicious barbecue and homemade ice cream, it even reminds me of Christmas—because in central Florida, Christmas is as likely to be 90º as anything else. Heat reminds me of home in the truest sense of the word.
I love having four full seasons now that I live in NYC, but somewhere between the end of Winter and the beginning of “Spring” I start to get desperate for the warmth to come back. I get what my dad would call a “bone chill” and I can never seem to warm up no matter how long I stand in a steaming hot shower, drying my skin into a flaking bumpy exoskeleton. Winter starts to feel lonely and Springtime in New York is, simply put, a sham. It’s four more months of winter but with much higher pollen counts. But when the first truly hot day comes bursting through, I instantly feel like I’m at home again, like I’m in my own body and things make sense that didn’t when I was frozen to my core—things like hope, to state it lightly.
There are some things that I think we never get too far away from, because they run deep in us, they’re part of who we are. Even when they don’t have specific memories attached to them, there are feelings that are anchored in the core of who we are and they can’t be washed away by time or space.
Hugs work like that too. My love language has always been touch, so it’s probably extra true for me but I think it holds true for all of us in a way. My friends always tell me I have “the mom touch”—I’m always scratching backs and squeezing shoulders and running my fingers through someone’s ponytail. (I don’t advise this if you aren’t close with someone—I wouldn’t suggest it with, say, your boss or a stranger.) And when I absent-mindedly love someone this way, they more often than not stop what they’re doing and melt. I see it—where there is stress it dissipates, where there is fear it is calmed, where there is physical tension it fades. The magic of touch, especially when it’s filled with love, is that it breaks down a barrier.
I can be doing my best impression of a person who is tooooootally fine, someone who has their emotions in check and is fully present in this peaceful moment, tranquil as a sea of glass, “Hello, nice to see you today, what a lovely dress!”—until a good friend gives me a hug. And then suddenly everything I’ve neatly boxed up inside comes bursting out and I have zero control, tears are streaming, my chest is doing that heaving thing it does when I’m strangling on that crying burn in the back of my throat, and I just have no ability to stop. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario—it happened last Sunday at church. It’s happened plenty of times before.
Because the thing with hugs is that they remind me of something in my depths—they are my first language. They remind me of being held and loved and safe and they make me believe that the body is more connected to the soul than we think. A hug brings to the surface everything I have buried inside. I don’t exactly know why this happens—what human instinct causes this visceral response? My best guess is that when you suddenly feel safe and loved, your subconscious says “Why would I bother expending all the energy to keep these things bottled up?”
But if I’m being honest, there are times when I don’t want to deal with that breakdown of my armor. When my husband and I are in a fight or—much more often—when I am stressed and being simply the worst version of myself, Jared will try to hug me. And I don’t want him to at first, I don’t want him to hold my hand or get too close. I don’t want to break down, to let the ice crack and let him in because I’ve got my thing over here that I have control over, my anger or my stress, and in a way that I understand, that’s working for me. But then, because he knows me and knows I can’t resist a good hug forever, he persists. He hugs me and it breaks down the wall I’ve carefully constructed and the next thing I know, I’m crying. I’m telling the truth about how I feel, I’m letting go of the panic that I wildly cling to as a means of control. And finally I can start accepting that things are terrible and tragic and I’m heartbroken, but also that it might be okay.
I wonder if it’s like that with us and God. Us, holding the Spirit at arms length because we can’t afford a crack in our painstakingly built illusion that everything is okay and we’re fine and we’re all cheerful church folks on a Sunday morning. And God, coming back time and again trying to give us a hug, trying to tell us that it’s okay to be a total mess, ugly crying on our friend’s shoulder in the lobby. God trying to give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be a child and feel safe and loved and warm in the summer heat.
I want my walls broken like that. I want more hugs and squeezes and pats on the back because they force perspective—they remind me that I am not an island, alone with my thoughts and my agony. God is here and there are people around me who love me and care when I’m hurting, and they will help me carry this overwhelming baggage, even when I pretend I don’t need their help. And I will keep giving hugs out anytime I can, because I want to give someone else the chance to be held together while they fall apart.
Love, Precious Flowers