He'd been laying on his bed for three hours now. His stomach was telling him he was starving, but the thought of any sort of food sliding down his throat made him nauseated. He was cold, but he didn't dare get under the covers. No part of his body felt relaxed, he was hot under his skin, feeling like something in him was pulling to get out and go... somewhere. He wanted to jump in a cold lake, or throw himself at wall; anything.

She had left, just like that. Had yelled in his face and stormed out the door. When the door slammed, the sound was distant, but the silence that followed was as loud to him as the rush of angry, fast cars on the highway. All of his friends stared at him in shock, and he'd reflexively turned away and sped into his room, locking the door and jumping on to his bed.

And he sobbed, sobbed for a long time. He let out his anguish as quietly as he could without the others hearing, though it was tactless. He knew the walls were paper-thin. They could hear him crying like a big baby from anywhere in the apartment.

Once he stopped shedding hot, angry tears he heard a knock on the door, and a sympathetic male voice call, "Sheldon?" He ignored it. There was another knock, but nothing else.

Then came a feeling that must have been similar to that of death. Sheldon felt like an empty shell. The endorphin rush from crying had relaxed him, but there were no good thoughts that made it comforting. A snapshot of her angry, hateful face- he truly hated having an eidetic memory- literally popped up every time he blinked, and it was agonizing. He tried to think of other things, but he couldn't. His brain was fixated on those spiteful twenty seconds.

He didn't know what he'd done until later, only when he'd pieced it all together using previous experiences he'd collected, the same way he'd mull over things whenever he'd apparently done something wrong. He'd hurt her, he'd done something devestating, and it was something that he wouldn't forgive himself for either.

She was his world; she literally connected him to it. He'd always felt as if everything around him was black and white, blurry. He couldn't see people clearly in their motives. He couldn't see how he fit in with any of them, they were all so different, and so strange. He looked at them and knew that relationships were important, and that they might be admirable for who they were, but he couldn't actualize any real affection for any of them. He saw them and they saw him, but it was like they slid past eachother, as if Sheldon had one foot caught in this dimension and his other foot caught in another.

She was the color. He could actually see into her, and through her, the others. She actually made sense and he made sense to her. It was perfect. Words flowed between them effortlessly, and Sheldon felt truly elated when he spoke to her or even looked at her. Sometimes, he'd be caught off guard, and she'd be giving him an approving or admiring look and he'd feel his chest tighten, or some part of his body jolt suddenly. It was almost as if he'd just lost a vital organ; his breathe caught and sometimes he got dizzy, but it was pleasant. He had never felt like that before, and at first it had scared him.

When she came along, he started to see as clearly as if he'd put on a pair of glasses. He knew what made the others happy and it made him happy too. He was quick to catch when someone was implying something. He really started to connect. It was if he'd just materialized fully into this world; they weren't all just rushing around him, confusing him, giving him a hard time, telling him things he already knew or didn't care to know, they were real people and he was just like them.

Before her, he was swimming amongst other people, and the water dulled their voices, the water diffracted everything he strained to see, but she was the bridge and she pulled him out of the water and on to it. Soon he really saw people, wasn't just living blissfully in his own mind all the time. He wanted to greet them, wanted to tell them everything was alright, he wanted to reach out to them and maybe do something to make their lives a little bit easier.

He didn't know how she did it. Somehow, he connected to her, and she was in between him and the rest of the world, ready to help him interpret everything that was going on, without actually doing so.

He loved saying things that brought out different emotions her. He could actually read her face; he could actually see a reaction to the words, affectionate or not, coming out of his mouth. One time he'd said, "I love you, Amy," just to see how she'd look. She'd smiled timidly, her eyes bright, and said it back to him, and he truly understood, for once, that her reply was definitely not sarcasm, she'd said it with precisely her entire emotional being. And once she said it, Sheldon was sure it was true for both of them. He'd replay that in his head every day, because it was the only thing that wasn't intellectual, but still made perfect sense and simultaneously made him utterly discombobulated. He'd think about it, and every single time, his heart would jump, his whole body would feel electrified, until Leonard was waving a hand in front of his face wondering why he wasn't answering him about what episode of Battlestar Galactica they wanted to watch next.

Every single word he said she took in. There was never a moment of confusion or sheer annoyance. She really cared about what he was saying, and though that should have made him feel simply accomplished for his ideas or thoughts, he just cared that she cared. It was no longer a game to impress with his intelligence, he strived to capture and savor every moment of this deep and very human bond they had.

And now she was gone. He didn't know if he could ever be connected to the world in the same way again.

A/N: Okay, seriously, 200 visitors and just one review? ;)