Five Hundred Thousand Words

It's true that he can stare at her face and guess wrongly that she's angry, because that's the mask she wears to distance him. She's accustomed to that mask. She sculpted that mask so carefully with her own experiences. But if he knew how she really felt, he'd cry with her. She knows that humans are clunky, bio-chemical organisms and she commands five hundred thousand words in her language, yet her poet's laboring lifetime can barely string them together to simply communicate one hour's worth of real emotions to a few meager souls. So inside she laughs, cries, screams, elates, shivers -- but she can't find the time to write the poetry that would move his soul, and even if she did, he doesn't read poetry.