Waiting Room-A Last Line Prompt

I walked in and was hit by the familiar smell of fear and disinfectant then wrapped my sweater tighter from the cold and discomfort. I glanced fleetingly into desperate, tearful eyes bruised egos, painful cries and an accumulated knowledge of urgency. The florescent lighting was a hallelujah on the empty seat next to a man whose head was down, chin wrapped in collared flaps of his plaid shirt and a profile at least seventy years old undoubtedly full of experience. I poured two styrofoam cups of bold brew, black, and took it back handed him one low enough to grab with his stressed pressed fingers. He gave me a nod, took a sip, and that's how it started. He was a German immigrant without a home. He had traveled from Denmark, to France, to Rome. He told me how he fell in love with the madness on the riverbanks, picked perfect, round apples from free orchards, watched the sunset put an orange glaze over the valleys of flowers so sweet you could almost taste and fought mobsters in allies with a knife no larger than a grass blade. He'd always attend the greatest balls in the greatest halls and even learned how to tango, jitterbug and dance the waltz. He told me about the first time he feasted on imported catfish with bulks of bread, cheeses, and fine wines with cigars assuredly dipped in glass halos and how he was "Dressed to the nines!" As soon as he lost his money and had failing health he felt like a brown paper sack or a puppet with anti-venom in a flask and no wealth to pull off the target of his bull's eye view ripped from it's thumb tack extinquishing the dark where love breeds and beams of blue waves reflected heavy denim stapled to lazy eyelids that hummed the song of faded days with a blank piece of paper and an empty pen. That's when I said to him "When the next crusade comes you must scrape at the wood with the sun, even with dainty fingers, my friend. " His name was then called by a nurse in the corridor he stood in loose jeans held by a belt that had not been seen by the tailor of a good, caregiving woman in many years. His soft, leathered hands, worn in, took mine placed in them his cup and said, "It's sad to me that it takes a threat to survival to believe life is worth living because of an emergency. Sometimes you have to find something worth the wait. By the way, this was the worst drink I've ever had, but the best I've ever been and I'm glad I was here instead of drinking coffee in the cafes of Berlin."