Saturday, March 24, 2018

The Stanger's Gift

I had pulled myself together and walked a full two blocks from the house before the tears started up again.  So by the time I reached the underground station, I was gently sobbing, as usual.  The platform was neither deserted nor crowded, and I took up a position equidistant from other people.  I knew it was impossible to effectively hide that I was crying, but I thought at least this could help me remain inconspicuous.  With my head down, I pulled out my phone and pivoted away from the nearest person.  It was 6 minutes to the next train and everyone stood in that odd, elevator silence.

I scrolled fairly mindlessly for at least a couple of minutes, my shaking providing an unmistakable tell, before someone a polite distance behind my shoulder spoke up.  An older man’s voice said, “I went through a very hard time, once.”

Crazies here are everywhere.  You can’t speak to them or make eye contact without getting yelled at, lectured, or worse, and in my condition, I had no energy for such a trial.  I didn’t react at all.

“There was so much pain that I… I just … couldn’t keep it inside.”  There was nothing in his voice that sounded crazed or drug-addled. But he was, nevertheless, clearly talking to me. I remained unflinching, but I listened.  He paused.

“So, I just cried.”  He spoke in an easy, slow fashion, like a grandpa telling a story in no particular rush.  “I especially cried at home, of course.  But when I couldn’t stop and still had to go out, I just cried when and where it happened.  At the grocery store, while walking the dog."  He paused again, this time for several seconds.  “On the train.”

He was pointedly violating the social etiquette of ignoring a crying man in public, and I would have been annoyed had his voice not been so patient, so open.  I turned my head.  Not to face him, but just to let him know I was listening. 

“It was like that for a long, long time.”  He sighed, sounding not of grief or regret, but of bittersweet memory.  “Too long.”

“One day, ” he started. The meter of his speech was picking up. “I was walking by the lake I loved and realized I had missed a season.  Hadn’t taken my favorite walk in months.  Maybe two seasons.  I had missed the flowers.  I had missed the birds.  My pain had kept me from something I loved for so long, and that realization brought a wave of hurt so sudden that I had to stop where I stood and just cry across the water.  Like it would understand.  Lonely and still, that it would reflect or absorb or… something… and I wouldn’t have to feel it.”

I was listening carefully enough at this point that my own tears had waned, but as he paused for the next chapter in his story, this unseen man’s breathing halted, was ragged for a moment, as though he were there by that lake, feeling his pain as freshly as I felt mine.

He gathered himself and continued, brighter, “and then a passerby stopped.  She awkwardly hovered for a second, and then asked if I wanted a hug.  I could never had said yes to a stranger at any time in my life before that, but I needed it so badly just then.”

There was no doubt what was coming next, and I was so horrified yet grateful.  So when he asked if this was that moment for me, I turned.  His body was already open to me, and I hugged him. 

It was a hug like my father gave me when I was a little boy who had skinned my knee.  It had none of the social distance Dad and I had put up when I was a teen, or that we had now as adults.  This stranger didn’t pat my back or indicate he would give up on me, and I clung to him. 

Then the dam broke, and I sobbed in the man’s arms so hard for what seemed like so long, and he said only, “I know how much it hurts.  You are not alone, and you’re going to be OK.”  He intoned it repeatedly, and I held him and shook as I cried.  After a time, I started to recover and remember I was hugging a strange man on a subway. I started to let go, and he did the same. 

I didn’t look up, but noticed he held an open hand out to me.  In his palm there rested a small bird’s ragged flight feather.  He said, “I thought you might like to have this.”

The train was arriving.  The doors opened, people started getting on.  Time seemed frozen, but rushed in the same instant.  His outstretched hand hovered there while my mind's stopwatch counted down the moments till the train's doors would close.  Confused and conflicted, I took the feather from his palm and got on the train, leaving him behind. 

I have no idea who he was; I never looked him in his face.  The ragged little feather is safe in its own wooden box.

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