Sometimes I enjoy hugs. Not the slight ones, the ones where skin rubs briskly against skin, where hair and hands are awkwardly entangled, the ones where acquaintances or professors or great elderly aunts unexpectedly lunge toward you, perfume and wool synaesthetically converging midair, eyes and noses hung in uncertainty, not knowing how to stare, not knowing how to smell, body uncertain of movement, and muscles reacting in response to hand-pulsed electric needles. I want hugs that suffocate, I desire hugs that crush—where looseness becomes kung-fu grip, steel bind.

I imagine being fully ensconced in somebody’s arms. My bones crush, and the sounds of my elbows disconnecting weirdly comforts me, and my body grows thinner and thinner as each piece inside me squishes into white powder, red pulp. I am shrinking. My nerves are damaged. My eyes need only stare at the shirt they are pressed against, stare until they too implode, powdering into my eye sockets, trickling back against my optic nerve, sprinkling to the ground blind, appropriate, and oblivious.