That Connecting Understanding

There's something in this that I understand without being able to explain it:

They went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. “What do you see?” she asked. “I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at the face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He was looking at a face but it could have been pears or a joint of meat. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later he still didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.

- richard siken

Found here.