To Hug, Or Not To Hug

She is young and proud and crying with despair. I want to give her a hug, to share a mutual communion hug, opposite of a hostile shrug instead of caring with each other, To cooperatively embrace recommitted to responsible compassionate health care giving webs and not receiving walls. But, I need to ask her permission first to cross this physical and spiritual boundary between older and younger, male and female, lighter and browner, employer and employee, To ask her if she would feel obligated to take care of my need to reach out and reassure her we are in this life together, Or could she freely say, Not right now? Without guilt or concern that taking care of me could or should be more important than taking care of herself, her wounded apartness past, her coping skills protecting too-thin self-esteem against sometimes smothering needs of others wanting to be full-steam fed, especially authority figures too often invested in Win/Lose games rather than Win/Win compassionate therapies. But, now is not a proper time to ask, when she is in emotional distress. Could she freely receive or deny an invitation to mutual embrace? For recommiting to we will not be broken by this, and perhaps this is our opportunity to grow together, mutually healed through solidarity embraced, co-passionate intent, reassurance, mutual access, physical AND spiritual, never either/or, with cooperative boundaries yet to be co-responsibly explored through more robust everyday compassion. Even so, I wish I could be free to ask her if we might share a co-redemptive hug rather than lurking in her wings of our chronic crisis stage with only her tears and my box of tissues to speak how much we care for a better tomorrow together rather than continuing too defensively apart.