#absence

Losing somebody: one suffers because the person who has died, the absent one has become imaginary, false. But the desire one has for him is not imaginary. Must go to the depths of oneself to where desire which is not imaginary lives. Hunger: one imagines foods, but the hunger itself is real: seize it. The presence of the person lost is imaginary, but the absence is real enough; it is from now on that person's way of appearing.

She felt the loss–the lifetime of it–of every night without him, of their communication, body to body, even in sleep. Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonising precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.