The Memory Pool
A creative essay examining memory and trauma
Note: This (very) personal essay contains a lot of very charged material that could be triggering to others, including sexual trauma, sexual assault, suicide, and mentions of self-harm. Some of the details are graphic. All is in service of truth.
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The Memory Pool
For many years I’ve told myself I don’t remember my childhood. I don’t remember became a protective mantra. If someone asked me about my childhood or my adolescence, my thoughts swept the surface of a broad expanse, only touching. Never pressing. I avoided eye contact with whoever asked, looking down and repeating the mantra out loud, for them to hear.
But I do remember.
Self-erasure, for me, was an act of protection essential to my survival. Had I always remembered, I would not have survived.
The act of unearthing psychically discarded memories is a treacherous undertaking.
I didn’t wake up one day and say: I remember.
I first had to accept that I was once a child, and innocent, with no felt sense of childness to remind me of my innocence.
None of my memories contain the freedom I have observed in children who are allowed any part of their childhoods; their lack of vigilance and fearless expression.
Fear is the summoner of my childhood memories.
Fear like a net rises through the water, capturing everything submerged and hidden.
To remember, I must pluck a memory from the net, its edges warped, and look inside.
Katie was one of the many girls I loved. The world told me I was a girl, and I believed the world because girl seemed the only option, yet I was not a girl like Katie. Skinny and feminine and obsessed with boys, with sea-glass green eyes and straight blonde hair, she was what I aspired to be and would never become.
We were two white girls in the eighth grade, both bad enough to end up at the alternative school. I’d been expelled the previous year for insubordination— I’d rolled down a dividing wall in my school’s hallway and refused a teacher’s orders to roll it up. It was not my first offense. I’m not sure if Katie knew what had gotten me sent to alternative school. I can’t remember why she was there. It’s likely that neither of us told each other the truth when asked. We’d both already learned to hide ourselves away and instead present something tougher and more dangerous.
Katie was pretty, and I was fat.
My body, my fatness and especially breasts, which were big like my mother’s, were persistent objects of conversation with my mom and stepfather. I was too fat, and I ate too much. My mom had married Hank when I was thirteen, only a year and a half before I met Katie. But that’s not when everything went wrong. One could say things went wrong when I was born, or even before I was born. Possibly things had always been wrong, and my mother and I were simply actors acting out the roles prescribed to us by our toxic lineage. But Hank didn’t help matters.
The year before, when I was thirteen, I had run away for the third time. Twin was nineteen, had box braids, and drove a peanut butter-colored Cadillac. He lived with his mixed half-sister in the projects not far from the house Hank had bought when he married my mom. Our first ever real house.
Twin was older and sexy and was liked and respected in the projects where several of my friends lived. When he asked for my number I gave it to him, and told him I was sixteen, though we both knew I was lying.
I had for reference my mom’s long line of boyfriends before her marriage— men who proposed to her, who begged her to commit. She discarded most of them. This, along with with my wide-ranging film archive, which I’d been compiling since much too young, were the whole of my sex education.
I spent one night inside Twin’s cramped apartment. We went to bed early and smoked weed out of a tin foil pipe while Jodeci’s Diary of a Mad Band played on his tape deck. I had imagined sleeping with him, of course, but in my own limited way. In Poetic Justice Regina King kept her shirt on when she fucked her boyfriend. I pictured myself tracing lines on his back with my fingernails.
Never did I think; I’m a child. I was pulling on a thread composed of my ideas of what the world was. We started making out and I didn’t object when he took my pants off. The reality of intimacy was so much different: the dank smell of pot on our breath, his rough breathing, the sounds of his sister doing dishes downstairs.
When we started fucking, he averted his eyes, as if he wanted something from me but didn’t want to see me. He kissed and sucked on my breasts, the appendages that felt most separate from me; yet I knew they made me sexual.
I’d first noticed them only when my mother hissed at me to cover them up as we walked through the pneumatic doors leading into our local grocer, when I was eleven. You should be wearing a bra.
It was that day, too, that I observed men observing my chest with vortex eyes. My mom noticed me noticing the men, and slapped my shoulder hard, as if my noticing were a kind of misbehaving.
I felt nothing as Twin sucked on them. After he fell asleep, I lay awake, aware of an absence. The absence wasn’t unusual, and that was surprising to me. The whole interaction was so familiar, because I had done it before.
I remember this now, but for many years, nearly two decades, I forgot this feeling I had, in Twin’s bed, and the shame attached, none of it about Twin at all.
There are other memories. My mother’s bed replicated and shrunken and hardened until they are stacked throughout my lifetime like cairns on a trail, guiding me in the wrong direction.
There were many different apartments, always the same bed and headboard; always the same rules. A sharp look if I came close to mentioning that we slept together in the presence of anyone.
In her bed I was always ordered to be still. If I moved or shifted too much she would shove me out, but only after she got her comfort from me. She called it comfort, the way she owned my body, and I learned to give it to her. Many of those memories are hollowed out, empty in their centers, painful to the touch.
As I got older I resisted and she demanded. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, alone.
One night, when I must have been ten years-old, she dragged me down our apartment hallway by my foot, into her bedroom. I do so much for you. Why is it so hard for you to do this for me? It was in moments like these, strewn throughout my childhood like land mines, that I learned how to prioritize other people’s pleasure. I learned how dangerous it was to refuse, and that a refusal, instead of it being an expression of one’s own needs, was instead an insult inflicted on someone else. There was no space for me to exist unless I was in the shape of a container, and holding.
With Twin, I’d expected some sort of exchange, but instead I was left with nothing, or less than nothing. His focused attention had promised something different than I had with my mother, but the outcome was the same. He snored and I wiped his cum off my belly with a section of navy blue flat sheet. I didn’t pause to consider how it felt, having sex with him. It would take many years, and sex with many men, to realize that it was the pinnacle of what I had learned: to give, and only give.
Twin was only the second person I’d kissed. My first kiss happened the second time I ran away, when I was thirteen and rode the bus to Pioneer Square, sat on a bench and waited for anything to come to me. I’d made the choice to leave home, because leaving was one of the only choices I could make without facing immediate repercussions. At home I did not get to make choices. I remind myself now that it was not really a choice, but an attempted escape.
I ended up wandering Seattle with a bunch of older girls who said they were in a gang. We huffed spray paint together. I’d never huffed spray paint; only paint thinner. Paint thinner, its sweet smell and the peaceful oceanic echo it induced, was the reason I’d run away in the first place.
My mother had found me sitting in my basement windowsill, Tupac blasting, a brown paper bag attached to my face. She screamed for Hank, her new husband. I was grounded for refusing to call him Dad, one of the many rules I refused to follow.
When he arrived, my mom said I can’t deal with her anymore. My mother had not ever truly dealt with me. The knowledge of this; an intuitive, wordless knowing, was what I hoped to erase with the paint thinner.
The girls and I crawled through the dark misty city until early morning, when a few of us broke off from the group. I slept on someone’s floor. The following afternoon, one of their boyfriends pressed me up against a brick wall in an alleyway behind Pike Place and shoved his tongue into my mouth. It was so big, his tongue, and pulses of heat shot down into my groin. I recognized the twin sensations of arousal and fear. I was accustomed to them.
A few hours after the kiss the girls jumped me in Pioneer Square. The oldest of them, in her twenties, started it by slapping me twice. I actually liked you. They came at me and hot liquid shot from my groin; a river of piss down my trembling legs. I didn’t punch back. I knew what being hit felt like. I fell onto the concrete and covered my head with my arms. Get up, one of them said when they were finished. I got up. Run, another said. I ran.
I walked home from Twin’s house the next morning, letting the rain soak me through. When my mom opened the front door she said welcome home you little slut; eyes blank like shiny river pebbles. Inside the memory I am drowned in shame, walking down the carpeted stairs to my bedroom, crawling into my bed, pressing my knuckles into my eye sockets for a moment so I could feel something different. Something.
Under my covers I was enveloped in my own scent— the cheap vanilla perfume I stole from the drugstore; Suave apple shampoo. I was obsessed with my room, my body, and having a strong smell, as if to erase the sharp tang of vodka and the salty warmth of popcorn which permeated the entire house. As if to assert my very existence as an individual.
My mom and stepdad were in the living-room, watching television. Their plodding footsteps resounded on my ceiling. Since their marriage I had spent most of my time in this room, away from them. As I lay there I envisioned my room as a cocoon. I envisioned my own apartment, shared with someone who understood me. Someone I had not met yet, because I revealed my true self to no one.
There was something I wanted, and I couldn’t name it. If I could whisper one thing into my ear, I’d whisper, it’s love. I’d whisper, no one will ever be able to give you what you never got.
From this point forward, my life was a song on repeat. Each person I fucked was a song. I’d listen closely to the song each time, hoping to find the thing I came for. But it was never there. If I could whisper something into my ear, I’d whisper, you’ll survive.
Nothing I say now can stop the past from happening, and that’s what hurts the most.
I was a child then. I was thirteen.
By accepting that I was a child I alchemize the shame that has distorted my self-perception for so long. Shame that sheared me into fragmented selves, each self expertly denying their memories, their feelings, their perceptions.
Opaque curtains of shame isolated these fragmented selves while sheltering those who could have (may have), borne responsibility.
Once Alchemized, the curtains slowly transform from opaque to gossamer to transparent. Their dissolution reveals me to myself. It reveals my mother. My stepfather. My father. And their stories, which are not mine.
I gather my memories, smoothing out the bends and distortions inflicted by other hands.
Pressing them into one another, each solid piece melting into the other, I am whole again.
I had run away three times by the time I was at Katie’s house. The first time, when I was twelve, I went to The Orion Center. That was before my mom got married.
We were living in a little pool house in a wealthy Seattle suburb. We’d only been there a few months. My mom left early for work and I neglected to walk myself down to the school bus stop. I skipped school a lot. My clothes were old and falling apart. I reeked of my mother’s cigarette smoke. The kids at my school had everything I longed for, and in me they saw something they hated. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I couldn’t hide from their hatred unless I didn’t go to school at all.
My mom came home that day, having begged off sick from work. She’d gone to the school for the house keys, which I always kept, and discovered my absence. When her car pulled into the carport I hid in a corner of the small office partition that cordoned off my flimsy bedroom. She yelled my name after opening the front door, using the familiar baritone that preceded all explosions. She only used that voice with me. I know you’re here, you piece of shit.
Slinking across my bedroom, which was only a partition and not a proper room, I gathered up a flimsy bag and stuffed it with a few things. I’m going to run away, I said as I stepped out from behind the partition. I resisted cowering. She cackled and lunged at me; I scrambled around her to the front door. You’d be doing me a favor, she said, then dug around in her purse, mumbling about me wanting to run away, how much she hated me, had always hated me. How I’d made her life hell. My heart thundered.
Here, she said, and threw a wad of cash at me. I cannot remember if the bills floated or if she crumpled them— only that when I crouched down to gather them I did so quickly, because I was scared she’d kick me. The bills got stuffed in the little bag and I departed. I took my time walking down the driveway, hoping my mom would call out: Wait, I’m sorry. But she didn’t. I walked to the city bus stop, and that night my mother was on a plane to Southern California to spend the night with my future stepfather.
I rode the bus to downtown Seattle and lied to the people at the Orion Center about my age. Thirteen was their cutoff. I wasn’t there long, either. A few days. Long enough for a shower. Long enough to start making friends. Long enough to imagine a life for myself outside of the life I was living. Long enough to know that what I wanted was not what I had. It was Trevor who told me to lie about my age— a gay kid who’d been kicked out of his house. It was him who made me think I could find people who understood me.
I wanted to stay at the center, but they quickly surmised my age and summoned my dad via phone book divination. He took me home because my mom was unreachable.
In the little studio I shared with my mother I made his instant coffee and instead of cream he got powdered skim milk, which was all we had. Where is your mom? That’s what the social worker kept asking. I begged my dad to let me live with him. I didn’t care that he stayed at a motel, or that he’d gone years without calling me. Anything was better than my mom. He said no.
Many decades later I’d see him, right before my mom’s suicide, at a pizza shop in Alki. I was twenty-nine. It was the only time I saw him as an adult. I didn’t know it was so bad, he said, and, it’s a miracle you turned out so well. His hair, which had been salt and pepper when I was younger, had turned white. Though he’d been in his late forties when I was born, it was only then, in his late sixties, that I noticed his age at all.
Whenever anyone asks me how I survived my childhood and adolescence, I shrug. Truthfully, I often wasn’t there. Not until after my mom died would I learn about dissociation and how it saved me. I can’t remember living outside of the complicated fantasy world I created for myself; one that guaranteed me escape and eventual redemption. I convinced myself I would become a famous movie star. I imagined myself into the lives of nearly anyone who appeared to have it better than me. At the same time, I feared being seen. Because my mom and I had moved so much, for unknown reasons, I learned not to get too close to anyone. I sometimes imagined that there were people secretly observing my life, waiting for my inevitable triumph. I pretended that my gaze was a camera lens. That the posters on my wall could really see me, and protected me.
Once, when I was much younger, maybe seven, my mother found a handwritten letter taped to my bedroom window, words facing out. I begged her not to read it, but of course she did.
I’d written to the Care Bears and faced the letter towards the sky, where they lived in the cartoon. Please take me to where you live. The letter was a plea for escape. She ripped it up, her teeth bared. I was an ungrateful little bitch. I wonder how my shoulders felt as she squeezed them hard and pushed me back onto my bed. I had two stuffed Care Bears, and she took the green one, the lucky one, and swung it hard against my face several times. I remember its plastic eyes, how they felt against my skin.
I often fantasized about being spotted on the street, either by a talent scout or a tender intuitive soul who clearly saw I needed saving. My mom rarely left visible wounds. She was engaging; charismatic. Young and blonde, with an easy smile. I saw who she was to others, and who she was to me, and convinced myself that this difference was my fault. There was something terribly wrong with me, to make her treat me in ways she didn’t treat anyone else.
She wasn’t cruel all the time. In her kind moments, when she appeared to love me, she told me I had saved her life by being born. I wouldn’t be here without you, she’d say.
This kind mother, who appeared inconsistently, was sometimes accompanied by the recalcitrant mother, who cried to me after an outburst and promised to be better.
Both of them evoked disabling amounts of guilt and shame inside me. If only I could be good enough, Kind Mother would stay. But I wasn’t good enough. I was too much. It was when I asked for too much attention, or needed too much, that kind and recalcitrant mother transformed into an obliterating force.
Teachers or neighbors called Child Protective Services a few times, but we moved whenever that happened. I had a Big Sister from the Big Sister program, who took me on Saturdays and whose apartment I sometimes slept at. She disappeared after an inquisitive phone call to my mother. I lived with my grandparents for two years. I was seven or eight when my mother and I moved in with them, but then she was on so many “trips.” I didn’t know where she was, really, but sensed my grandparent’s agitation whenever I asked, and stopped asking after a while. One summer day she came to visit and passed out from too many wine coolers. An ambulance was called.
Grandma was a recovered heroin addict who could have gotten into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most unbroken ash logs on her cigarettes. A night nurse, master communicator, and secret writer with thick gray hair whose texture I’ve inherited. To me she was an oracle, an open stream of love and wisdom, except when she was trying to sleep during the day.
Some evenings, I went with Grandma to her AA meetings. Other nights, Grandpa would drive her to the hospital where she worked. Our only music was the mechanical hum of the windshield wipers and their rubber blades scraping the wet windshield. Sometimes he’d switch on the classical radio channel, but only at low-volume. The car’s rear window alcove was littered with bee husks. I tried to avoid their tinder-dry hollow bodies. Grandpa chewed spearmint Trident gum and its scent filled the car. It was always raining. Grandma had never learned how to drive.
I had grown up with stories of their bad parenting. Grandma passing out in her own vomit in the living-room, or Grandpa whipping my mom and her siblings with his belt. The kids didn’t band together but individually tried to protect themselves. I often comforted my mother as she cried about her lost brothers and sister, how broken their relationships were. I knew it was up to me to save her.
Since my mother had married Hank CPS had visited twice. My mom was good at charming them, and I was good at questioning my own experiences. That’s why it must have blindsided them, when I told a social worker that Hank had come into my bedroom at night and I awoke to him on top of me, his open mouth threatening to connect with mine.
I recounted it clearly, more than once. But when the social worker brought my mother into her office, just the three of us, I watched my mother’s face transform to stone. She’s a liar, she said. Hank didn’t do that.
I always thought this memory was murky, but inside of it now everything is so clear. My mother’s eyes and how impenetrable they were. What it felt like to be outside of the shelter of her love, even if that love was inconsistent. Or absent. I didn’t trust her, and yet she was the only one I felt safe with. My working definition of safe was much different than anyone else I knew. Or, maybe I didn’t have one.
I stayed with a friend for a few days. When I came home to gather more clothes, my mother’s eyes passed over me, unseeing. I understood: Hank had more to offer than I did. She only spoke to me once, to say that I had to confess. I had to call the social worker and say I was lying. So I did, and the three of us went back to her office.
Before I sat down with everyone, the social worker took me aside. She was taller than me, and squatted down, staring into my eyes.
I know you’re not lying, the social worker said.
I resisted crying and shook my head. I am lying, I said.
When Katie, me, and her brother got to the dealer’s house I was surprised that he really did look just like Kurt Cobain. Katie had seen Nirvana at Pain in the Grass, or so she told me, and I envied her. He’d been dead less than a year. She had to be lying, right? What would she have been, twelve? Thirteen? But I thought Katie was much cooler than me because she had already fucked a lot of guys. In my time at alternative school I’d kept my love for rap and hip-hop but also veered towards Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and Black Sabbath. I watched what Katie did and did that, in the hopes that I could garner the kind of adoring attention she reveled in.
I can see us now, me and Katie. Both of us unrooted and longing for what we didn’t have. We performed for one another, I am sure. I propped her up with my admiration, and she me, with hers.
I didn’t tell Katie about my mom. We didn’t talk about those things. Back in her apartment we doled out several lines of meth on the coffee table with her brother and her boyfriend, both of them nineteen, and snorted them, then chain-smoked and drank cheap beer as the chemicals rearranged the molecules of our bodies into their prime order. Methamphetamine cut through my self-loathing, revealing an alternate reality.
I marveled at my face in Katie’s bathroom. Was I pretty? Despite the scabby acne clustered along my hairline, my face looked good. At the least, it had the potential to look good. Maybe I would be beautiful. I turned in the mirror, pressing my loose shirt down flat. I wasn’t as fat as I thought I was.
Katie’s apartment was like the ones my mom and I had lived in together; a small living-room with an old ragged houndstooth couch, a mangled Goodwill coffee table, a couple of ashtrays and the whoosh of the patio door when everyone decided to smoke. Nicotine-stained framed pictures of Katie and her brother when they were little kids lining the wall. A lingering smell of Rice-a-Roni. Plastic cups for water. My mom still smoked inside, but only next to the fireplace, where the smoke wafted up and out if there was a DuraFlame burning.
Out of the bathroom, I wanted to fuck everyone. Katie’s older brother looked angelic; his face framed with curly blonde hair like a sexy cherub. I loved Katie unconditionally, even though her hot boyfriend was a piece of shit. Katie didn’t talk about it much, but he was racist. It felt traitorous to be in the same room with him, yet there I was, being charmed.
Katie and I smoked on the patio, gossiping about kids we went to school with. We were bisexual. In our mid-nineties world it was fun for girls to be bisexual as long as the bisexuality left space for men’s pleasure. Men did not talk about their bisexuality. It didn’t occur to me that many of the girls my age hadn’t yet had sex. Many of them were still kids.
When Katie asked me what I thought about her brother I knew he’d asked about me and knew we would fuck that night. I thought of Twin, a faraway thought because I’d not seen him since last summer. I hadn’t had sex since then, but I’d done other things with boys.
I didn’t want to fuck Katie’s brother. I wanted to be desired.
If her brother wanted to fuck me, and we fucked, that proved I was worthy of being fucked, and maybe that translated somehow into being worthy of love.
It would take me a long time to parse this out for myself, the way I had twisted up men wanting to fuck me with my inherent worth. When I looked at men, I watched their faces for signs of approval and desire. I did not ask myself what I thought of them, or if I desired them.
Katie and her boyfriend disappeared into her bedroom, and Chris and I went to his. We made out for a while, which I liked at first, until I got light-headed. Then he went down on me. It didn’t feel like anything, but I knew I was supposed to feign pleasure, so I made the sounds I’d heard my mother make when she was fucking. She was always so loud, it was impossible not to hear, even though hearing it nauseated me. Chris climbed up my body; a body that appeared fully developed, despite my age. It was a powerfully feminine body, though I had not asked for it, and would not have asked for it, had I been asked what sort of body I wanted.
Chris’s gaze was intense. He kissed me and put on a condom before we started having sex. The scintillating methamphetamine high morphed into a rawness I wasn’t expecting. His pale body hovered above me, shapeshifting under the stuttering light which emanated from the cluttered window above the bed.
My insides transformed. As much as I had wanted him an hour ago, I now wanted him off me, wanted to be home in my own bed. Not even my own bed, but somewhere warmer and safer. A nonexistent realm I always longed for.
My isolation revealed itself to me. I stiffened underneath him and in turn his body shifted. A yawning sadness dilated, unchecked and unexpected. How was it possible to feel so isolated and yet in such close proximity to another body?
Chris pressed his mouth to mine; our tongues touched, and the warmth and softness of his mouth yanked me back into his room, but only halfway, only half-free from the sadness. I couldn’t ask him to stop, I was sure. Instead, I kissed him back and resumed my performance of pleasure. I scratched his smooth back with my chewed-down nails and clutched him closer to me. I whispered yes and, seeing that this pleased him, whispered yes again. It was not new, this performance. I was surprised at how easily it went over.
Like Twin, Chris rolled over when he was finished and fell asleep. I lay there, knowing I didn’t belong anywhere, knowing that what I wanted from Chris would never be gotten from him, yet simultaneously imagining a future where Chris told Katie he was in love with me, spellbound by me, therefore elevating me in her eyes.
When I imagined Katie thinking I was cool, thinking I had some secret allure not yet discovered by her, I felt intoxicated by the fantasy of my superiority.
When I imagined Chris being in love with me, nausea replaced the intoxication.
When I imagined Chris discarding me, a viscerally familiar sensation overwhelmed me, though I didn’t recognize its origin and wouldn’t for nearly two decades. Few of the words I have given to this experience were available to me then.
Now, I explore all the states of being. Why, at the thought of Chris wanting me, did I feel sick? Hadn’t I wanted to be wanted by him?
This nausea continued to confound me into my early thirties, after I had slept with hundreds of men.
Now I recognize it as a symptom of my own self-erasure; something that had been woven into me, whose threads I am still unweaving. My nausea, which I ignored, signaled violation, and yet I had no concept then of violation. MY body was an object of currency. I gave it, and in return I got these fleeting moments of false intimacy. It was the only kind of intimacy I knew.
The residue of Chris’s sweat, the image of him throwing his used condom in the trash, the half-light and the threat of morning, the gasping despair which threatened to drown me unmasked my desolation. I was alone. No one was looking out for me. Chris, as I’d imagined him, was a fabrication, and I had no power over him. I had no power at all.
Late the next morning Chris gave me a ride home. We listened to The Offspring, a band I hated. He turned it up loud and we didn’t talk. Katie lay in the backseat, sleeping, her presence meant to quell any suspicions my mom and Hank may have had about Chris dropping me off instead of Katie’s mother. But my mom and Hank were gone when I got home. I didn’t shower. Instead I went to bed and slept nearly fourteen hours, only occasionally waking to the sound of the alternative station. I dreamed of Kurt Cobain and awoke to Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” I’ll always associate those melancholic guitar progressions with that night at Katie’s, and the sadness I felt, which I attributed to the meth comedown.
Not until my mid-thirties, after a few years of therapy and several years after my mom’s suicide, did I truly question what happened with Hank. My mom and him held my lie over me for years, and I also believed that I had lied about what he did. Yet I remember him in my bed. I remember the story I recounted. But I still question whether I lied or told the truth. My mother is dead. Hank is an untrustworthy person, now an advanced alcoholic whose life, from the outside, retains a sheen of success.
I gather the memories and smooth them with my fingers, rubbing away the stories others told in order to corrupt the truth. I reveal the memories, and I remind myself that I was once a child.
If this essay affected you in any way, or you have stories and thoughts to share, please do so in the comments. Make sure to be kind.
I wish I could hug you and contribute to healing your inner child. You deserved more. ♥️
That you can write about these experiences with such beauty and grace is astounding, Anastasia. I cried for the young version of you that had to endure so much. It’s so fascinating to me that when we’re living life as our teenage selves, we think we’re so grown up and capable of making the right decisions for ourselves, but without loving guidance it’s near impossible to stay safe. Like Kristin, I wish I could go back in time and give you a huge hug.