It was a Saturday. That meant french toast in the morning for breakfast, laundry at night. The day wasn't so structured in between these two events. But I considered it to be structured unstructured time. I used the weekend to take a break from work, but that didn't mean I didn't think about it. The equations and the ideas they would illuminate were never far from my mind. Everything could be represented in numbers, in the elegant linking of formulas, everything could be explained if...if the right equation was plugged into the right place. It almost went beyond words.
I went out to the kitchen. Leonard was sleeping in his room, I could hear his deep and even breathing. I could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning in the apartment, the electric buzz of the refridgerator(spelling) as it made ice. I could hear everything. The squeak of the floorboards under my feet, the way my clothes rustled when I walked, the cars passing by on the street.
My mother had taught me how to cook before I left for college at 11 years old. I remember how she smiled at me and brought me into the kitchen and said, "Now, Shelly, I'm gonna teach you how to cook," We spent that whole day cooking, and she went over everything.
I made enough breakfast for me and Leonard. I figured he'd be up by the time it was done. It was almost done when I heard someone coming down the hall, but it didn't sound like Leonard. Leonard had a heavy way of walking, his feet almost slamming into the floor. This walk was different, lighter, the footsteps landing in different places. If it wasn't Leonard walking down the hall it had to be Penny.
"Good morning, Penny," I said, a second before she emerged into the kitchen area. Her hair was frizzy and strands were going every which way. She squinted at me, pulling her robe tightly around her.
"Sheldon...how did you know it was me?" she said, yawning. I didn't feel like explaining the whole thing to her, about how she walks differently than Leonard, and how I deduced who it would be in the hallway if it wasn't Leonard, so I shrugged. I frowned, realizing that I had only made enough breakfast for two people, not realizing Leonard had a guest, despite the fact that he was required to let me know such things.
"What's wrong?" she said, and I looked at her, my eyes widening. I had just thought about the fact that there wasn't enough breakfast for three people, the thought had just come into my mind, and now Penny knew something was wrong. I understood on a certain level that most people could do this, they knew certain things based on facial expressions and tones of voice, but I was still pretty much unable to do it, despite knowing about it. When I was younger it seemed very mysterious to me, how I might be upset or disturbed about something and then someone would ask me what was wrong. How could they know the thoughts in my head? Some of them. Other things, intricate ideas that involved the tiniest particles and elementary mathematical formulas, I could spend hours explaining these things and most people could not understand it.
"There isn't enough french toast for the three of us," I said.
"It's okay, I'll just have half of Leonard's, I'm trying to cut down anyway," she said, walking around me to rummage in our cabinets for the coffee cup she liked to use when she was over.
"How do you know Leonard will agree to that?" I said, thinking she might just mysteriously know, the same way she knew I was upset about something the second I thought it.
"I don't know for sure, but I bet he won't mind," she said. Penny was pouring herself coffee, and I was going to tell her that if she wanted to "cut down" she could start by not putting half the bowl of sugar and so much cream into her coffee, but Leonard came into the kitchen at that point. I hadn't heard him in the hall. I always heard him in the hall. I looked at him with slight surprise, wondering how he had made it to the edge of the kitchen and I hadn't heard a thing.
He put his finger to his lips when I opened my mouth to say something. So he had wanted to sneak up on Penny and had walked quietly to obtain that objective. I nodded at him and watched him creep up to Penny's back, put his arms around her, and she giggled and turned around.
They split the plate of french toast I had made for Leonard, and they talked of their plans for the day, and I ate quietly, because I was trying to follow the numbers that had appeared in a tantalizing string in my head. I could visualize the numbers and move them, try different things with the equations, all in my head. When I wrote it down it made it much more intricate, the numbers in the real world and the ones in my head interacting.
"Sheldon, where are you?" Penny said, and the numbers and equations that were being formed slid to the side as I turned my attention to her, wondering how she knew that I was deep in thought when I was just eating. What was it in my facial expression that revealed these things to her? And it wasn't limited to non-geniuses, I knew that. Leonard, Howard, and Raj could all easily derive conclusions from facial expressions and tones of voice, which was something even more mysterious. I knew that there were facial expressions although I rarely picked up on them, but tones of voice was something else. I didn't even really know what it meant. Words were words to me.
"I was thinking about work," I said, because she wouldn't understand even the beginnings of what I was contemplating. Leonard wouldn't even understand it.
When they left to go to lunch I was relieved. Now I could write down the numbers and get lost in them, and I didn't have to worry about the inadvertent clues my "facial expressions" and "tones of voice" were leaving for everyone around me to divine.