All words I do not speak, I cannot and will not speak.

And the ones I hear?

They crush me.

Even the pauses between the words, crush me.

And I hear them, the men in suits, the loud confident women.

They speak like they know the truth, but they’re truth is, in me, a spasm.

Their words are coughed up into my mouth like bile, and I swallow them down, because there are no words that I speak, or even wish to speak.

Even if I had them, they would be violent, wrong, sinful words.

They would betray me, turn my rags to suits, my mind to mush, my heart to rock.

But their words attack me in their presence and haunt me in their absence.

They taught me to cry out.

An individual’s language is a socially shared set of rules as well as the thought processes that go behind verbalised speech. The four communication modalities are audio comprehension, verbal expression, reading and writing, and functional communication. Occasional trouble finding words, losing the ability to speak . . . intelligence, however, is not affected. It is not related to speech which is the verbal aspect of communicating but rather the individual’s language. The use of formulaic expressions in everyday communication is often preserved.