[ Making tea and preparing coffee while John cooks is an old reminiscence now, one it takes a moment to place as specific to Etraya. Something they'd shared years ago for a few spare months, unique and priceless. Harold marvels to realize he can recapture it now, heating water and making their morning drinks while John does the real work. It's an allegory he recognizes.
For as little patience as he has with the particularities of cooking, he somehow engages fully in making beverages. His tea is exactly as he likes it and John's is just to his taste, despite never once asking him how he preferred it. He just noticed. He paid attention, the way they are always watching each other.
He wants John to live, not for him but with him. He wants him to know that Harold will be here for him always, so he doesn't have to strain to merit his regard. He can measure who he is for himself and rest easy that no matter what he comes up with, Harold will be here, waiting, trusting fully.
John scrambles eggs while the tea steeps and the coffee brews -- he's making a new pot -- and Harold sits, ruminating over how so little and so much has changed in one conversation. Nothing real is different, but how they understand one another, what's said aloud, is completely new. There's real value in taking things out of the shadows and into the light (as Root had said before she'd died--) and now Harold, coward that he'd been, is finally facing it.
He should move past the emotion of what they've just discussed; he'd been the one to push them in this banal direction, to cooking, having breakfast. But he's been such a coward-- and he doesn't want to be, not yet another time. ]
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart, [ he says softly, mostly to himself, as John places the ready food on the table and takes his seat. ]
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For as little patience as he has with the particularities of cooking, he somehow engages fully in making beverages. His tea is exactly as he likes it and John's is just to his taste, despite never once asking him how he preferred it. He just noticed. He paid attention, the way they are always watching each other.
He wants John to live, not for him but with him. He wants him to know that Harold will be here for him always, so he doesn't have to strain to merit his regard. He can measure who he is for himself and rest easy that no matter what he comes up with, Harold will be here, waiting, trusting fully.
John scrambles eggs while the tea steeps and the coffee brews -- he's making a new pot -- and Harold sits, ruminating over how so little and so much has changed in one conversation. Nothing real is different, but how they understand one another, what's said aloud, is completely new. There's real value in taking things out of the shadows and into the light (as Root had said before she'd died--) and now Harold, coward that he'd been, is finally facing it.
He should move past the emotion of what they've just discussed; he'd been the one to push them in this banal direction, to cooking, having breakfast. But he's been such a coward-- and he doesn't want to be, not yet another time. ]
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart, [ he says softly, mostly to himself, as John places the ready food on the table and takes his seat. ]
... I was always very taken by Rilke.