Stories Series #4
We spend a lot of energy in our work with young people planning activities and accomplishing shared tasks. Yet sometimes a moment can arrive unexpectedly out of nothing more than circumstance. This story is about one of those unexpected moments. A cold night, a delayed train, and a brief encounter in the space of ordinary life.
* * *
When I first arrived from my flight at the nearby airport to take the train home, I expected a half hour wait. I sat on the ground leaning against the fence away from the crowd down the way. No intention other than to have a quiet minute alone.
The train was running late. That wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the departure board kept nudging the delay out only twenty minutes at a time. It was now three hours later and a bit disorienting.
The sun had long since set and now the overhead lights cast long, thin shadows across the concrete. The open-air platform had emptied out slowly, one frustrated traveler at a time, until three remained. A man sleeping in his jacket on the other side of the tracks, someone sitting down the way in an area with benches, and me, trying to pass the time by working on notes under the flickering lights.
I was tired, a little numb from the cold, and focused on getting through the wait and getting home. Then I felt the shadow approach me. I hadn’t noticed the individual from the benches was a young person.
She didn’t drift over accidentally. She had the kind of courage it takes to walk up to a stranger when you’re anxious and alone. She initiated the contact and from the beginning I sensed that choice carried its own quiet strength.
Her hair was choppy and uneven, tinted blue to match her eyes. Thick glasses caught the overhead lights in quick flashes. Her voice was tentative but steady. Like the voice of someone who felt anxious but wasn’t afraid to take up space when she needed to.
She told me she had needed to use the bathroom for a while. She was freezing and hungry but hadn’t eaten her packed dinner because she didn’t have a fork.
The bathroom was a pressing need, and I said I knew there was one about a block away.
“Would you watch my bags if I brought them over?” she said as her eyes lit up.
“Of course,” I said, “But you don’t have to bring them over, I’ll walk down and sit with them.”
We talked a bit more about where exactly the bathroom was. She was worried about being allowed in or if there would be someone there who would question her.
“Look confident, like you know where you’re going,” I said.
She smiled and took off, and I went and sat by her luggage.
When she returned, she was limping with a twisted ankle and propped her foot up on the suitcase with a small wince. She brushed off the injury and told me she was really flexible, then demonstrated double‑jointed elbows and fingers. She talked with her hands, animated and expressive, as if her body was helping her words find their way.
It was at that moment something shifted. Subtle yet unmistakable. Any tension dissolved and we had moved from strangers on a deserted platform to two people sharing a moment.
She settled on the bench, close enough to talk without raising her voice. As we sat together, her voice shifted from shaky to calm. Her shoulders dropped. Her breathing slowed. She began to talk. Not in a rushed or frantic way, but in a steady stream, as if she’d been holding these stories in her chest for too long.
She went on to explain she had a lot of social anxiety. She had spent the day with friends, she said, and left them early to get to the station on time. She’d been rushing, anxious about missing the train, and now here she was. Stuck, cold, hungry, and alone in a place that felt more like the Twilight Zone than a train station.
She told me she was autistic and nonbinary. She told me about the medications she’d been put on as a child so she could manage school; medications she never wanted and believed had shaped some of her current challenges.
All I had to say was ‘that sounds interesting’ or ‘you’re a strong person,’ and she opened another door.
She wore large headphones to block out the noise of the planes that roared overhead.
“It’s like my body is trying to climb out of itself,” she said, describing the noise.
Her parents didn’t accept any of her challenges, Not the sensory overload, not the anxiety, not the identity.
“Just deal with life like everyone else does,” they told her.
She mentioned them because it had gotten so late, they couldn’t pick her up at her destination anymore. So, she had asked her grandparents to pick her up and felt guilty about it.
“They’re old,” she said. “They go to bed early.”
She told me about her eyes. She was born with cataracts and had to have hard lenses implanted when she was really young, which caused several vision challenges. And then she lit up about virtual reality headsets. She knew everything and taught me all about visual fields, field depth, cognitive load, and memory residue. She spoke with a clarity and intensity that made the cold fade for a moment.
There were moments of silence between us, too. Not awkward, but full. The kind of silence where two people simply exist in the same space, breathing the same cold air, letting the night settle around us. We were on a train platform but felt like we had been stranded on the moon.
In those pauses, I felt something shift inside me too. I realized I wasn’t just keeping her company. She was keeping me company too. I realized that maybe this was why the train was delayed. The reason we’d been stranded on that cold platform for hours. The universe had arranged a moment of connection between two strangers who needed it more than they knew.
We were simply being together and the mutuality of that felt grounding.
It was all the things we talk about and do in our work. Presence, acceptance, connection, intentionality, meeting others where they are. There was no trying too hard and no preconceived agenda.
The twist is that it wasn’t as much me supporting her as her supporting me. And maybe that gets close to what we mean when we talk about things like mutuality and shared experience.
The train finally arrived with its blinding headlight. We scrambled to grab our things and climbed aboard. The warmth of the train car felt almost unreal as we had adapted to the cold of the platform. The car was quiet, everyone half‑asleep. Only single seats remained, so we sat a few rows apart.
I saw her once more before my stop. She had retrieved a fork from the café car and was finally eating her dinner. When my stop came, she looked up and waved a warm goodbye.
I stepped off the train feeling I had received something I didn’t have at the start of the journey. And whatever that something was, had now settled somewhere deeper than I expected.
* * *
Relational practice can thrive in quiet spaces. In moments where presence matters more than expertise and listening matters more than instruction. Both on and off duty it’s easy to hide behind roles or preconceived goals. But that night there was no script, no planning, no outcome to aim for. So much can unfold when we simply sit with another person without agenda or urgency.
In that unstructured, uncertain space, something meaningful emerged. I can only speak to how the moment felt from my side, but her openness nudged me to notice my own capacity for stillness and curiosity. She reminded me that connection is something we allow, not something we manufacture.
We never know which small gestures will become anchors for someone else, or which brief conversations will shift something inside us. Sometimes the most meaningful connections happen not because we planned them, but because we allowed ourselves to step into the unknown and be available when the moment arrived.
This is the fourth of six chapters being published in CYC-Online from the new book Stories from the In-Between: Relational Practice Teaching Tales. (Garfat and Modlin, eds. CYC-Net Press)
