Chapter 26 26. Harold and the Coffee Shop

The last leg of the journey is the hardest.All Harold could see was the road, and there were no thoughts in his head.The pain in my right leg had recurred, and I was limping when I walked.There's no fun to be had, he's in a place that doesn't exist.Flies buzzed around his head, and sometimes bugs bit and stinged him.The land is vast and empty, and the cars lined up on the road look like toys.Another mountain, another sky, another mile, all the same, and he was so weary that he almost gave up.He often forgot exactly where he was going. Lost love, nothing - nothing?What is that word?He can't remember.He remembered that the word at the beginning should be next to single person, but he couldn't remember it.Nothing is important anymore, the darkness that drenches the night sky, the rain that hits the body, the strong wind that makes it impossible to move.He fell asleep wet and woke up wet again.He can no longer remember what it feels like to be warm.

The nightmares he thought he had shaken off had returned, and he had nowhere to hide.Whether waking or dreaming, he relived the past over and over again, and from it he felt new fears.He saw himself standing in the garden trellis, swinging the ax wildly, with wounds on his hands, his whiskey-drunk head bobbing from side to side.He saw his fists bleed profusely on thousands of colorful glass pins.He heard himself praying, rolling his eyes and clenching his fists, but those prayers meant nothing.Sometimes he would see Maureen turn her back on him, walk into a blinding white light, and just disappear.The past twenty years had been stripped away like this, and he could no longer hide behind the banal or the cliché.As with every detail of the land, all pretense is gone.

No one can imagine such loneliness.He shouted hoarsely, but there was no response.He felt a chill in the depths of his body, as if ice had formed from the bones.He closed his eyes, thinking that he would never wake up after falling asleep, and he didn't have the slightest motivation to resist this thought.When he woke up again, his skin was scratched by the stiff clothes on his body, and the skin on his face was sore from the sun or the cold. He just got up and took heavy steps again. The shoe was bulging in one place, and the place where the upper met the sole was open, and the sole was paper thin again.At any moment his toes would come through the hole, and he wrapped the roll of blue tape a few times, from the bottom of the foot to the ankle, so that the shoe and him were one piece.Or was it the other way around, that he and the shoe became one?He began to feel that the shoes had a mind-will of their own.

go, go, go.This is the only language.He didn't know if he yelled out, or was thinking in his mind, or someone was even yelling these words at him.He felt as if he had become the last person in this world, there was only road left in the whole world, and the whole of him was a walking machine.He was a pair of blue-taped feet walking towards Berwick. At half past three on a Tuesday afternoon, Harold smelled salt in the air.An hour later, he came to the edge of a hill, and there lay a small town in front of him, with the endless sea beside it.He approached the pink-gray walls, but no one stopped to give him a second look, and no one offered him any food.

On the eighty-seventh day since he went out to post letters, Harold Fry arrived outside the gates of St. Bernardine's Sanitarium.Including detours intentionally or unintentionally, he walked a total of 627 miles.The modern building in front of me is not at all pretentious, guarded by rows of rustling trees.There is an old street lamp near the gate and a sign indicating the location of the car park.Several figures sat on lawn chairs, like clothes hanging out to dry.Overhead, a seagull whirled across the sky and called a few times. Harold walked across the slightly curved asphalt road and put his hand on the doorbell.He hopes that this moment can be stopped, cut out from time and space like a picture: the black finger pressing on the white doorbell, the warm sunshine on the shoulder, and the smiling seagull on the head.His journey is complete.

Harold's mind flashed the path that had brought him here.I walked across the road, hillside, saw houses, fences, entered shopping malls, passed street lights, and mailboxes, and none of them was special.They are just the places he walked, and anyone may pass through these places.The thought suddenly brought him a tinge of pain.At this moment, which he thought must be full of joy of victory, Harold suddenly felt a little scared.How could he think that these ordinary places add up to more?His fingers were still hanging on the doorbell, but he couldn't press it.What is all this for? He thought of those who helped him.Those whom no one wanted, no one loved, he counted himself among them.Then he started wondering what would happen from here.He would give the gift to Queenie, thank her, and then?He would go back to a life he had almost forgotten, to a world where everyone used little things to separate themselves from the outside world.Back to the master bedroom where she hadn't slept all night, and Maureen would move back into the other room.

Harold pulled the backpack over his shoulders again and turned to leave the nursing home.The figures on the sun loungers didn't even look at him as they walked across the lawn.No one was waiting for him, so no one noticed his coming and going.The most extraordinary moment of Harold's life had come and gone without a trace. In a small coffee shop, Harold asked a waitress for a glass of water and asked if he could use the bathroom.He apologized for not bringing any money with him, and waited patiently for the waitress' eyes to pass over his greasy, tangled hair, his jacket and tie that were riddled with holes, and finally landed on him along his mud-soaked trousers. I don't know if it should be said to be wearing sailing shoes or blue tape feet.She curled her lips and looked back at an older woman in gray. She was busy talking to a few customers, and she was obviously of a higher rank.So she said to him, "You better hurry up." She pointed him in the direction of the bathroom without touching him.

Harold saw a dark, vaguely familiar face in the mirror.The dark skin seemed to be too much compared to the bones inside. There were several piles hanging loosely. There were several wounds on the forehead and cheeks. The hair and beard were messier and thicker than I thought, and the eyebrows and There are hairs sticking out of the nostrils like wires.He's a ridiculous old guy, an anachronism.Nothing like the man walking out with the letter, nothing like the man posing for the camera in the Pilgrim T-shirt. The waitress gave him a disposable paper cup with water, but didn't ask him to sit down.He asked if anyone would lend him a razor or a comb, but the gray-clad executive came over right away and pointed him to a sign on the window: No begging.She tells him to leave or call the police.No one looked up when he walked to the door, wondering if he smelled bad.He had been out in the field so long that he had forgotten what smells were good and what smells were bad.He knew those people were embarrassed for him, and he wished they wouldn't have to.

At a table by the window, a young couple is bending over to tease a baby in their arms.This scene caused a sharp pain in Harold's heart, and he didn't know how he could still stand up straight. He looked back at the management and the other customers in the coffee shop, looking them straight in the eye."I want my son," he said. These words made his whole body tremble, not a slight shudder, but a violent tremor emanating from the depths of his body.Harold's face contorted as the pain ripped through the muscles in his chest and hit his throat. "Where is he?" management asked.Harold clenched his fists, trying not to let himself fall.Management said, "Have you seen your son here? Is he in Berwick?" A customer put his hand on Harold's arm and said in a much softer voice, "Excuse me, sir. , are you the pilgrim?" Harold took a breath.It was the man's kindness that broke him. "My wife and I saw your story in the newspaper. We had a friend we hadn't seen in a long time, we just visited him last week, and we talked about you." Harold let the man grab his arm and said Go down, but he can't answer, can't move. "Who is your son? What's his name?" the man asked. "Maybe I can help?"

"He called—" Suddenly Harold's heart sank violently, as if he had fallen off a high wall and fell into an endless void. "He's my son. His name is—" Management looked at him coldly.The other customers stood behind him, the well-meaning man still clutching Harold's sleeve.They all know nothing.I don't know the fear, confusion and regret churning in his heart.He couldn't remember his son's name. Outside on the street, a young woman tried to slip him a leaflet. "Tonight is a salsa class for people over sixty," she said. "You should come too. It's never too late." But it was too late, too late.Harold shook his head frantically, and staggered a few more steps.The bones in the legs seemed to be missing. "Take one, please," the girl said. "Take them all. You can throw them in the trash when you get back. I just want to get home."

Harold stumbled on the road in Berwick, holding a large stack of leaflets in his hand, not knowing where he was going.People tried to avoid him one after another, but he didn't stop.He can forgive his parents for not wanting him, for not teaching him how to love, or even how to express it.He can forgive his parents, and their parents' parents. Harold just wanted his child back.