This is something of a style experiment for me. Let me know what you think!

Words, Words, Words

Lizzie Bennet had long considered herself to be a woman of words. Her earliest and favorite memories were of sneaking into her father's den hours after she should have been asleep, and climbing into his lap to listen to him read aloud from whatever he was currently studying — Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Euripedes. She very rarely understood the words, but she was enchanted by the sound of them, their rhythm and cadence. She used to fall asleep to the sound of vibration of her father's voice, and it remained one of the most soothing sounds in the world to her.

Words had been her passion as long as she could remember. She had pored and puzzled over them as they had been read to her, trying to match the sounds to the shape of the letters on the page. She studied Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan in secret when she was barely five years old, fighting to learn the words on her own, so she could surprise her dad. She still remembered the look on his face when she'd brought A Little Princess down to his study and read the whole first chapter all by herself. He'd been so proud of her, and that pride had lit a fire inside her that nothing had been able to extinguish.

Words became her life. She studied them, devoured them, rewrote her life around them. She read everything she could get her hands on, watched documentaries on Hitler and FDR and Martin Luther King, Jr, eavesdropped on arguments and debates, trying to figure out how and why and when words had a powerful effect on humankind.

She found theatre her freshman year of high school, and she had a natural affinity for her, but while performing someone else's words was fun, she discovered she was much more passionate about crafting her own thoughts and ideas into powerful speeches and moving statements. She joined mock trial and debate team and forensics, and ended up winning a statewide debate contest at the age of sixteen.

Her mother's response, mostly joking, was "Oh, grand. We've given her an award for arguin'. Just what she needed," but her father looked at her again with that pride, and in that moment, she knew. This was her calling.

She got her undergraduate degree in Interpersonal Communication and had been so inspired by a senior seminar with Dr Gardinar that she applied for the graduate program in Mass Communications without a second thought.

She adored the written word and couldn't get enough of it. She lived on critical analysis essays and literary critiques and thrived on spirited debate. She could spend all day discussing the evolution of the American novel or theories of transmedia narratives. She longed for a person in her life who could keep up with her, but so far, they'd all been either pretending to know what they were talking about to impress her, or pretentious douchebags not worth her time.

Words had served her well her whole life, and had never failed her, unlike plenty of people she could name. She had never believed that actions spoke louder than words, not really. Words could speak plenty loud if people would just learn to use them properly. Body language could be misread and social cues shifted and changed, but words were straightforward and simple. If people would just talk to each other, the world would have a lot fewer problems. She believed that firmly and thoroughly.

And yes, there were moments in her life that might seem to run counter to this proposed belief, like the time she'd kneed Terrence Richter in the groin for putting his hand up her skirt at a school dance or the time she'd punched Donovan Crewes in the mouth because he wouldn't stop making fun of her sister or the time she'd walked out of a classroom without a word when an incredibly sexist professor had told anyone to leave if they honestly thought that physiological differences between the sexes didn't make gender equality impossible.

But those moments were the exceptions, and they never came about because Lizzie hadn't been able to find the words to say. No, they had come about because the people sharing the encounter were too unenlightened, thick-headed, or arrogantly egotistical to listen to the words she had to say. They had never come about because words had failed her.

And then Lizzie met William Darcy.

She hated him. She hated his pretension and his snobbery and his selfish disdain for the feelings of others. She hated the way he wrapped silence around him, like his words were too precious to be shared with the likes of the people of Netherfield. She hated that whenever he did speak, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was always a second meaning hidden beneath the words, that he was never just saying what he meant.

And she hated that he had the power to make her speechless, that he, of all people, was able to put Lizzie Bennet, the girl always ready with a quip or a comeback or a retort, who could verbally spar with the best of them and had a trophy in her room to prove it, into such a furious, into so worked-up a frenzy that words escaped her. It infuriated her, and it only got worse after he confessed his feelings and wrote her that letter.

Because, good God, that letter. Lizzie would have cut off her left arm to be able to write like that. She could write, yes, she could even write well. But that letter went beyond "well." William Darcy wrote masterfully, and if he'd been able to speak as well as he could write, Lizzie's feelings for him might have taken an altogether different route. As it was, she read his letter over and over again, imprinting the rhythm and cadence of his words onto her mind, losing herself in the sound of them as she'd done with Shakespeare and Voltaire and Dostoyevsky all those years ago. And that was a startling position to find herself in, even before she factored in what his words were actually saying.

They were shoved into a room together at Pemberley, and Lizzie felt like an adolescent schoolgirl, stammering and stuttering and stumbling over the words she had once been in such command of. And it wasn't because she felt anything for him, but because when she saw him, all she could hear was the rhythm of those words he had written to her, echoed in his speech now that he was comfortable and at ease. And the longer she spent in his company, the worse it became.

Because he talked about hyper-mediation in media and verisimilitude, and for a solid 25 minutes over lunch the day he and Gigi had taken her to see San Francisco, they debated the emergence of educational content on YouTube and what it meant for the future of media companies like Collins&Collins and Pemberley. And it wasn't until their food had come and silence had descended that Lizzie had realized that William Darcy, who she had hated so passionately, with such vehemence, had done what no one else in her life had ever been able to do – he'd kept up with her, and more than that, she was almost certain he'd enjoyed it as much as she had.

But then George Wickham happened, and whatever might have been growing between her and William Darcy was cut short as she went running back home and he stayed in San Francisco and silence descended between them, thick and heavy and oppressive with all that had been said and all that hadn't.

He gave her his number, pressed it into her hand as he passed her into the car, but she didn't call because she didn't have the words. And when she found out what he'd done, even the few vague ideas of things she thought she might be able to say to him someday disappeared, chased away by the reality of the magnitude of his actions. No words, just actions again, and she had no idea what they meant. Where this man was concerned, she never did. And after misinterpreting so many of his actions in the past, how was she supposed to guess with any certainty what they meant now?

She couldn't talk her way around him anymore. There had been a time where she'd used so many words on him, chattered about him endlessly, saying whatever cruel, expressive thing came into her mind, but not anymore. The complexity of what they were couldn't be boxed in by words anymore, and that truth frustrated her to no end.

She didn't have the words. For the first time in her life, she didn't have the words. Even when he was sitting beside her and asking her for them, they weren't there. She stammered and stuttered and stumbled over them, and even when she got them to come out, they weren't the ones she wanted. So eager was she to fix their miscommunication, she miscommunicated it even further; so desperate was she to clear the air that her unpolished thoughts given voice muddied it to a greater degree.

She could feel them misconnecting, almost see the conversation they were trying to have ride itself off the rails, and a part of her mind demanded in a tone of frustration she'd used countless times before, Why can't the two of you just say what needs to be said?

But for the first time, another voice snapped back, just as frustrated, Because, Lizzie, it's not always that simple! Stop assuming that anyone not as well spoken as you is inferior to you! Sometimes the situation resists simplicity! Sometimes words are inadequate!

And before the shocking implication of that thought could fully hit her, he was confessing his feelings to her for the second time, taking the leap they had both been avoiding, and she was as speechless this time as she had been before, but for entirely different reasons. And where before she had gathered her thoughts and put her words together into a barb to fling in his face, now she heard him say, "If you just want to be friends," and she knew, she knew she didn't want to hear the "then" statement that was about to follow. Now the words were just getting in the way and they could talk at this for hours and never get any closer to the heart of the matter.

And so she kissed him. She kissed him because words weren't enough and because she didn't have the time to try and find the right ones and because she knew that after everything that had happened between them, he would doubt whatever words she gave him, even if she'd had the time to find the ones she wanted.

She kissed him because part of her had wanted to kiss this man since she'd read his breathtaking letter. She kissed him because she loved him and he loved her, and that's what you did when you loved someone who loved you back. She kissed him because they would have the chance to talk about all of this and work it out and clear the air, but words took time and right now, she couldn't bear the thought of being apart from this man for even one more second. She kissed him because she knew the kiss would say the things that she didn't yet know how to say. And when he kissed her back, she heard his own unspoken words loud and clear.

Lizzie Bennet would always consider herself to be a woman of words. The beauty of a well-turned phrase would always set her heart beating a little faster. The rhythm and cadence of the words of a gifted public speaker would always be as sweet as music to her ear. The give and take of a spirited and well-argued debate would always exhilarate her beyond almost anything else.

But loving William Darcy changed Lizzie Bennet in many ways. Loving William Darcy taught her that between the right people, a silence could communicate as much as any conversation, that learning to say the right thing was not as important as learning to listen to what other people were trying to say, and that when used together, actions and words could convey anything and everything under the sun.

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