David Bradley
David Bradley
David Bradley is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in Trembling with Fear Magazine, Story Quilt, and Sonic Boom Literary Magazine. He graduated with an MFA from Columbia University in 2017 and has been shortlisted in Uncharted Magazine's novel excerpt contest in 2023 and 2025.
What I’ve Gained Cannot Be Lost
One morning, after a friend and I meet for breakfast, they open their arms to say goodbye, and I hug them without hesitation. I don’t realize it yet, but this is the first hug I’ve given in years without hesitating.
My friends and family don’t notice this about me. It’s a mental thing. I’m practiced enough that there’s no visible pause between someone opening their arms and my hugging them. The hesitation occurs between blinks, a prick of awareness, a super-computed calculation, the result of which is always the understanding that physical touch, no matter its source or purpose, will make me think about my father abusing me.
It’s not a severe trigger. I don’t cry or disassociate, and I haven’t angsted about it since high school. But it’s there, a parking meter that, while accepting only small forms of emotional currency, must still be fed a toll. An uncomfortable one, at that.
At least, that’s how it seemed to work until recently. I don’t know what changed, how, and if it’s temporary.
#
My father was a teacher, but he worked out, played sports, painted, and fixed things, too. His hands were his path to experience. Callouses separated the meat of his palms and fingers from the world. I remember feeling them, how rough they were. It’s hard not to believe his personhood wasn’t sculpted into his physical form, and that the two were anything but un-extractable from each other.
Likewise, it’s hard not to think of touch and violence in the same way. My earliest memory of my father is of him screaming at and chasing me through our Forest Hills apartment. I was three, and I remember the way his callouses tore at my soft skin as he caught, lifted, and spanked me. Years later, classmates would want a high-five, fist bump, or—particularly with other boys, and especially if we were playing a sport—a clap on the shoulder or chest bump. Someone would raise their hand to me, and my shoulders would hike around my neck as I jerked away. This was an obvious sign of my father’s abuse. In being obvious, it was embarrassing.
I fell behind my peers as they explored touch-based communication. They can use touch as a means of expression while I give soft high-fives and fist bumps, and never slap people on the back or touch their shoulders in reassurance. When I hug people, it’s limp and lacking in heartiness and affection. I understand, mechanically, what I have to do to show physical affection, but my emotions don’t infuse the gesture. Touch is a language I understand but struggle to speak.
I know someone who never learned to manage her speech impediment. She mumbles her way through multi-syllabic words—a self-defense mechanism. Hiding portions of a word is less embarrassing than audibly mispronouncing it. She thinks she speaks like a toddler, but she has an adult’s awareness, and the subsequent dissonance harms her speech further because she lives in a state of shame. That approximates how I feel about my understanding of touch language. I was averse, failed to develop it properly, and am now too ashamed to employ it, thereby robbing myself of practice.
The result? Touch starvation, a feeling of disconnect, shame, regret, and anger toward my father, who is now dead and can’t answer for what he did, or even explain it.
#
He passed from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2006, and his physical condition deteriorated long before then. The last time he physically abused me must have been 2001 or 2002. Yet, I didn’t begin to confront my touch aversion until high school.
I met my best friend in 2007, and he helped me ease out of my shell until I wormed my way into a friend group of fellow nerds in 2008. Hugs were their way of saying “hello” and “goodbye”, something they were so comfortable with they didn’t think twice before initiating with me. The first time I hugged a friend, we’d been hanging out in the school library, and as the bell rang and we moved to part ways to different classes, she opened her arms to me and said, “Hugs!”
On an instinctive level, I knew denying the hug wasn’t possible. She’d already initiated and, more importantly, I wanted to be her friend. As a sixteen-year-old with limited tools to examine my own state of being, and years before self-care and therapy language entered mainstream vernacular, all I knew was this: she and I existed in the nascent stages of friendship, and I wanted to nurture that, which meant learning her friendship language. Which, in turn, meant hugging her. Which I did.
I made a connection and rendered it in physical form, a point of pride and excitement. But it felt so alien, too. I gave a lousy hug and received hers as though her arms were tentacles.
The hug’s aftermath was quietly monumental. A door had been unlatched, and I didn’t fear what stood on the other side. Friendship could be more than shared interests and senses of humor. Something deeper existed, and it was okay to reach for it.
It’d be an overstatement to say I bathed in the high of the hug’s aftermath. There wasn’t much of a high to bathe in, but there was a brightness, however short-lived, that hit like a shot of caffeine.
Afterward, I was still the least physically affectionate member of that group. I accepted a hug when offered, and while it was nice, my internal hesitation—that prick of trauma—kept me from going further. Then, in early 2009, I got a girlfriend.
#
I’m gay, which I wasn’t willing to accept at the time, but that’s a different story. My girlfriend and I lasted a month. The relationship wasn’t particularly enjoyable for either party. I was withdrawn, and I felt like she made her emotional state my responsibility. We were ammonia and bleach, two useful chemicals that, mixed, become mustard gas. But she was also my first kiss.
She’d been nursing a crush on me and, one night, sitting on the sofa in a friend’s house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I was so surprised I didn’t feel anything except, “Oh! That just happened! I’m supposed to be happy about this!”
I kissed her back. On the lips. A chaste peck, but still a kiss. My first, and a reckless but positive step.
Allow me to correct an earlier statement. The kiss I shared with my girlfriend was actually the first time I touched someone without hesitation. Maybe it was only because of how my blood rushed or how I internally screamed in celebration of achieving this moment I never, ever thought I’d be worthy of. I kissed my girlfriend plenty of times after that, and hugged and held her. There was never hesitation. Nor was there with my two future romantic partners. Touch was comforting, powerful, ecstatic. In fact, in the case of my first boyfriend, with whom I had a long-distance, primarily online relationship, the absence of his touch became painful.
He lived in Texas; I lived in New York. We were twenty and met on an online forum, talked for a few months, realized we liked each other, and confessed our feelings. I only met him in person twice, the first time being a trip I made to Fort Worth. I flew alone, stayed at a hotel, and he took a bus to meet me. After our first night together, where we cuddled, kissed, made out, and had sex, he froze me out. Of the four days I spent in Texas, he slept one night in my hotel room. Fully clothed. In a hoodie. Zippered to the neck. In June.
There was obviously more going on than a lack of touch, that night. He never did explain the problem despite my clearly being upset at how he treated me. But those layers of clothes and that stiff way he lay on the bed—like Frankenstein’s monster strapped to the table—said so much. His coldness made my chest ache, made me feel like something was wrong with me and, when I finally worked past self-blame, that something was wrong with him. How dare he?
Prior to that, the absence of touch had always been within my control. I elected not to touch people, and I had good reason to do so. Being denied when I craved it was like a needle puncturing my sternum.
Things fell apart with my boyfriend soon after, but months later, I met another guy who lived in the same state, New York, and with whom I had an actual first date. We held hands and slept in the same bed on the second date, and later that night, with neither of us able to sleep, killed time with foreplay.
This was a relationship filled with immediate, tactile satisfaction. He allowed me to make up for years of touch starvation without complaint. So long as we were in private, I constantly caressed him. It wasn’t sexual. I just needed to touch him, to feel his skin, his solidness, the fact that he was there next to me. He never pushed me away. We were at ease with each other’s bodies and had fun with ourselves. Sometimes, he’d slap my ass when I walked by. Not hard slaps, nothing kinky. He did it as a joke, but it made me feel loved, sexy. Someone actually wanted me and wouldn’t zip himself in a hoodie to keep away.
All this is to say, my mind categorizes romantic partners uniquely. They’ve always had certain permissions I’d never grant others. I can have this one person whom I’m ecstatic about touching, when I’d never allow myself that freedom with anyone else.
My second boyfriend and I broke up in 2014, about five months after I graduated college. I began initiating platonic hugs roughly around the same time. With my ex-boyfriends' help, I nudged myself toward the physical connection I wanted, despite my body’s protests.
#
But what progress I’ve made, I’ve made without grand design. I wanted touch. I sought it. I hesitated. I went through with it, anyway.
The quietness of the end result, such that it went unnoticed ’til recently, isn’t surprising, then. But it is concerning. Progress made incidentally, without intention, is progress that can be undone.
I write these last paragraphs a year after the rest of this essay, and everything makes sense. I think back to the hug with my friend that started all this introspection. We’d been standing outside the entrance to the J train, bundled against December’s cold. Our embrace was more a suggestion of touch than the real thing. I still say it counts. I remember the look on their face, bright, yet casual and unaware of the significance of this event. I remember my own lack of awareness until I returned home and sensed something about the world had shifted for the better.
My progress can’t be undone, anymore. I’ve trapped it in the amber of these words. I am aware. I understand where I come from and what I’m made of. What I have gained cannot be lost.