She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.

he began to feel that she was very lonely indeed. “If he’d been here,” she said, “those cowards would never have dared to insult me.” She thought about “him” with great sadness and perhaps longing — about his honest, stupid, constant kindness and fidelity; his never-ceasing obedience; his good humour; his bravery and courage. Very likely she cried, for she was particularly lively, and had put on a little extra rouge, when she came down to dinner.

Sometimes you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling. You just feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones.

he wasn’t even dead. But when there is suddenly that emptiness in your home and in your heart, the loss feels very similar to death.

And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion — like the phantom pain of an amputee.

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

I just...I just miss him. And I hate being so alone.

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

She takes her life and starts turning it into something beautiful without him. She learns how to love herself in the most intricate of ways. She goes out and spends time with her friends when she is lonely. She learns to love her alone. And often when she finds herself missing him, missing the good moments with him, she whispers to herself, 'The absence of you has taught me how to love myself. So thank you, my darling, my dearest.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?

You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

Somewhere in his body — perhaps in the marrow of his bones — he would continue to feel her absence.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.