She leans her head in her hands and wonders when her life became so fucked up. From the outside it appears ordinary enough, but in it, living it, it is a kind of mundane hell that creeps and crawls and slowly envelops you in its smotheringly banal embrace. Except for that one pinprick of light (emphasis on the prick) that bucks all the trends, stubbornly refuses to be pulled under the insipid swell, and is the reason she even knows words like banal.
She would never have imagined that the man-mantis with the rigidly structured life would be the one part of her existence that held some kind of wonder. But he did. It was in his brain, that massive fucking brain that held everything inside, and when she could pry it open, just a crack, she could see galaxies in there.
And when he curved his lips against hers, it was like having stars poured into her mouth, like lightning shooting up her spine and discharging tiny explosions in her cerebellum. Like being utterly lost and completely found in one moment.
It scared her, that one inexpertly delivered kiss could shove her life off its axis, make her feel like she was looking at the world from an angle (it might have been the alcohol).
So she scrubs her makeup away, downs the last of the wine, and curls up in bed to sleep. If her mind races, chasing thoughts and sensations down a rabbit hole she gave up on years ago, she doesn't place too much emphasis on it. If her heart pounds despite the depressant effects of the alcohol, she just presses her hand to her chest and fights back the tears that try to fall for all the potential lost. For all the disappointed, resigned, confusion of her life.
Across the hall, Sheldon sits in his spot; rigid, staring, and not taking in the Doctor Who rerun playing out on the screen in front of him. His vision is awash with numbers and equations, and every now and then he reaches up to adjust something on the invisible whiteboard of his mind. Calculations, probabilities, correlations, and causations.
This is the only way he knows how to untangle the knot of feeling in his chest. If he can quantify this, break it down into calculable chunks of data, maybe he can understand.
In the morning he has moved to his whiteboard, has co-opted Leonard's whiteboard, and there are pieces of A4 paper spread all around the room. Strings and strings of interconnected formulae run rampant on fields of snowy white. His eyes are wide and staring, elegant hand cramping from writing, writing, writing, a stream of consciousness expressed in numbers and letters and no words.
He will solve this, he will measure the totality of the human experience, such as he is capable of experiencing it, and express it cleanly and completely- with math. Not messy, imprecise words, arranged into sentences subject to reader interpretation. There can be no misunderstanding when all is numbers.
