Troy is there, and then he isn't, just like that. To Abed it feels like looking into a mirror and not seeing your reflection staring back at you as it should be. It feels like realizing, halfway through a phone conversation that you lost the signal and have spent the last five minutes talking to dead air.
It feels wrong, but Abed does what he always does: he recompartmentalizes his brain so that it works again. He isolates the sadness and locks it away.
People ask him how he is handling the change. He says that he's fine, and he means it. No one ever asks him if he's fyne, so he never has to lie.
The space between fine and fyne is where the sadness leaks out, the way water runs through your fingers no matter how tightly you cup them. The space between fine and fyne is where he misses Troy.
I - Inspector Spacetime isn't the same anymore, but he continues to watch for a while all the same. Then Constable Reggie leaves to pursue his own adventures-and it's good for him, he says, and it's good for him, Abed knows-but it's like feeling a wound reopen.
J - He realizes that television shows don't always Jump the Shark when two characters move in together. They can also Jump when a character leaves.
K - In the end, he's a little bit glad that he missed seeing the Kickpuncher premiere. He's forgotten what it's like to watch those movies alone.
L - Friends don't lie to each other, but he still told Troy it was alright for him to leave.
M - He used to always watch movies alone. In time, he thinks he'll remember how to do it again.
N - He is still afraid that no one else will ever have patience with him.
O - He wants to believe Troy will be back in one year, but his mother told him it was only temporary, too.
P - He doesn't plan on making any more pillow forts. He still keep his friendship hat by his bedside, but he can't check to see if Troy's is there anymore, and he isn't going to risk it.
Q - Troy was the only one who could keep him from hating most of his quirks. He thinks he's starting to hate them again, and that scares him.
R - He doesn't let Annie call anyone to repair the air conditioning when it goes out in their apartment, even though he hates the heat.
S - Sometimes Annie suggests that they all brush up on their Spanish, but somehow his voice always seems to stop working when he tries. He doesn't have a partner, anyways.
T - They didn't let Jeff or Britta touch Troy's twenty-second birthday. They spent the day marathoning classic coming-of-age films instead. Now Troy is living his own coming-of-age movie and Abed isn't around to film it.
U - He thinks that no one understood him before, and he's afraid no one else will take the time to understand him again.
V - He regrets not taking more video. He regrets that he made so many movies about them, when he could have been making movies of them.
W - He wonders if all the wishes they have wished for over the years would bring Troy back, or if they need to be together to make them work.
X - He once asked if they could celebrate Christmas as long as he made sure to call it X-Mas instead. Troy didn't know, so he's still waiting on the definitive answer.
Y - He's never even been on a yacht. Irrationally, he wishes Troy had never taken the sailing class, or that he had taken it with him.
The space between fine and fyne is the part of his brain he can't seem to reformat, a gaping chasm of five years, littered with too many memories that won't leave him alone.
It's the space that he's falling into, which no one sees he needs to be pulled out of.
He isn't fyne. But no one asks anymore.