Though furtive, his glance felt intense. I was drifting into yesteryear, lulled by the clickety-clack of the tracks and the heat of that first summer day, trying to place the face when my stream of thoughts was interrupted.
"I am sorry to bother you. Is your name Fabien, by any chance?"
The now strong-looking, self-assured 25-year-old had often crossed my mind over the years. Frank was his name. I invited him to sit down for the remaining 20 minutes of my rail journey.
We had met during my first counseling experience at a residential facility for underage abuse survivors. He was 15, no longer living at home, trying to reconcile his mother's decision to side with her husband, whom he had struck with a hammer. Frank had claimed self-defense. At the hospital, an inexperienced male staffer who was trying to remove Frank's clothing for physical examination was injured after being forcibly pushed off. Frank ended up being restrained. Over time, he became known as "the kid with a bad temper," with an established diagnosis to go with it that would be used to define him: a teenager with an oppositional defiant disorder.
"I hear you," I'd told him in our counseling session after his second suicide attempt in a month that I'd interfered with.
"You don't! You can't know what it's like to be me," he'd shouted, the anger betraying raw helplessness. He had been right. I did not know what it was like to be him. But I managed to convey to him that I understood the recurring distressing dreams he described and the mistrust in others that was laying the foundation for relationships to come. The repetitive unwelcome attention, the shame of it long after it had ended. The betrayal of a physical body, giving in, feeding the guilt associated with a physiological response. Substantial yet ineffable, grief accumulates over time, impossible to outgrow, a twisted pattern with no end in sight changing who we become: numb, essentially, with only the yearning to survive. That day, with his recognition of our parallel lives, he broke down.
Sitting opposite me in the train now, he told me about his last suicide attempt at age 19, which coincided with his father's birthday. He had planned to jump off a building wearing his red jacket, a last gift from the father he missed, who had died in a head-on collision six years earlier. On that cold autumn night, hands in his pockets, he'd felt something in one of them. It was a note I'd left with him on the day he left the center at age 15. He asked me whether I remembered what it said. I did. I had written that I needed him to know that he had been seen, and that though it seemed unfathomable, better times might lay ahead. I'd written that I hoped he would find the conviction to honor himself if confronted with a new temptation to "end it all."
Now, sitting on the train, he told me that since that day he'd often wondered whether we would ever run into one another. I too had often reflected on my encounter with Frank.
He said that the jacket no longer fit, but he kept it carefully stored away.
As we approached my destination, I thanked him for sharing his story and wished him all the very best before leaving the wagon. As I stepped onto the platform, he rolled down the window and called out my name. He extended his hand, and I shook it. Then he pulled me in with both his hands, hastily thanking me for giving him hope and for saving his life. He swore he would "pay it forward." As the train started moving, he called out that he hoped he would make me proud. I nodded, smiled, and told him he already had before waving goodbye.
I do not recall much from the 30-minute walk that ensued, except my stomach writhing and an intrusive knot in my throat as I headed up my usual shortcut, a desolate wooded path. Suddenly overcome by emotion, I stopped and began to hyperventilate. I could only surrender to it, though I was afraid that a state of panic might soon take hold. I started shaking, and then I began to cry, a merciful release as I understood the true meaning of forgiveness: the release of all hope for a better past-an essential passage to becoming who I am.