Signature Here

His voice muffled beneath his mask as he sat in the lobby's couch. Grey strands of a life long-lived peeked out from beneath his Dodgers cap. A youthful lid for a frame too frail to swing a bat. He was talking on his phone to someone asking for his personal information.

Medical buildings look and sound the same after a while. Only the people change. And even then, we all start to look and sound alike. Limbs bent into chairs that travel down the hall. Heads slumped between shoulders filling out paperwork pens on a leash that say 'signature here'. Elevators filled with uncomfortable stares. Bathrooms with keys attached to artificial bones. Waiting rooms without patience and coats so white they burn the skin.

But with every history that passes through these walls, is a story never told. A person the doctor will never know. This is what I thought as I passed the man in the lobby talking on his phone.

It was his date of birth that caught my ear. 1938. My parents were born around that time, but somehow it sounded different from a man I did not know. Images of pending war crept across my mind. I wondered what his parents thought when he was born - what kind of world were they bringing this child to? At two years of age, World War II brought change. Did his father go off to war? Did he return?

Have you ever stopped to think about how much that can matter between a building entrance and an elevator door? I had not, until yesterday, when this man made me want to know more.

We pass by so many lives each day. Worlds built and shattered, hearts filled and broken. Bridges crossed and bridges burned behind eyes that have seen too much.

Yet in that fleeting moment was just a girl in a chair passing by a man on his phone with a form he must sign with an X next to 'signature here'.