You don’t hear about it because there’s no story there.

He’s nobody.

84 – Nobody.

103

234 – WITNESS

It’s difficult being so far from home. Immersing yourself in a different culture and setting is an interesting and worthwhile experience, but the simple things like being able to talk to your family become more taxing due to time differences. You’re alone.

And when simple things become hard, you find that the difficult things are more unlikely to be dealt with properly.

He needed somebody to talk to. It was that simple.

Yes, there was the girl in the shorts, who was definitely teasing him towards an inevitable sexual encounter, but most of their conversations were cloaked in innuendo on account of that tension. And while the lecturers encourage you to speak to them confidentially, if required, they’re not like school teachers, they’re removed a step. And you’re older. It doesn’t sit well. It doesn’t feel right.

You don’t want to be the twenty-something guy who misses his mother. Your friends don’t want to hear that. You’re sick of waiting around for an email or a text. You’re from a different country, so you’re unaware of organisations like the Samaritans, who are there to talk, not just save the suicidal.

But your family has money and you receive a generous allowance that gives you the opportunities to experience all that university has to throw at you. You could use some of that money to unburden yourself. You could’ve paid a prostitute to listen. You don’t need guidance, you just need to get it out, have somebody hear what you are saying.

Not yet.

It’s not that bad.

What do you have to complain about?

Then, one late afternoon, you’re on your way back to campus on the train and it stops and you wait and you look around the carriage and you gaze out of the window and nine people jump off a bridge in front of you and you freak out and you want to go home.

But you can’t.

And there’s screaming and filming and texting and questions and the train starts to move as though nobody has noticed anything and you’re not allowed off the carriage and then you are, and some people get the hell out of there and you wish you had, too.

But you didn’t.

And the police come and they ask you what you saw and they say that you have to go to the station to give an official statement and you think you’re in shock because you blindly do as they ask and you go to the station and relive the event in your own words and it’s recorded and things are written down and at some point in the waiting area you are given the card of a therapist with no real intention to ever use it.

But you do.

You make the choice.

He will listen. That’s his job.