" Did I want her? I thought to myself. Suppose, now, she were to change her mind: Did I want her? Of course not, I assured myself. Was her loss important? How stupid to imagine it was. Nothing of any significance had happened. It was simply that my own life was so barren, or seemed so barren; the temporary possession of her had given me the illusion that it was not, while I had her, barren; now that she was gone, the barrenness that she had temporarily helped to conceal lay exposed. It was because we thought so much that love could save us, that having nothing else but the dry labour of our work we looked so anxiously towards love. It was our ridiculous phoenix.
To suffer, or to experience a suffering for the loss of a girl who had no importance, was absurd; I was absurd because I was suffering; it was something that required hiding away because of its absurdity. "

― Alfred Hayes , In Love