Love and Passion and Anger and Death

They hurt him more than words could say. His mother had taught him about the emotional content of words, about the ways in which the greatest authors intertwined love and passion and anger and death in those strokes of ink. Love and passion and anger and death, he had repeated with a sense of wonder. He had read the books, and he thought he understood. Then the numbers ripped his soul apart.

There had been no emotion in them, and no cruel taunt in their arrangement. No skilled author had invented them to twist and maim his heart. But, as he read them, he had cried. Their dull, sterile, unchanging rationality had been more painful than even the most brutal of words could ever be.

A long time later, years afterwards, he sat and read another set of numbers scribbled in pencil on a notepad. He didn't cry, didn't react much at all, but inside his mind there was an all-too-familiar turmoil. The numbers themselves were nothing: banal, ordinary, the familiar tags of his life he wrote every day without a thought. His birthdate. His social security number.

When she asked him for yet another number, it wasn't the words that shook him. Words had never shaken him. It was the realisation that perhaps, just perhaps, she had an idea that he had once been that boy crying over a printout in a hospital room. His only salvation was the fact that she never expected him to lie. Numbers, after all, were expected to be truthful.

After she had gone, after they had all gone, he added one more number to the page. A truthful one, which made it hurt all the more. What did a six year old boy know of love and passion and anger and death? Too much, he thought. And nothing at all.