“Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.”

“A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.”

“He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

“But even though I was with my father again, I never felt really secure deep down. I don't know how to put it exactly, but things were never really settled inside me. I always had this feeling like, I don't know, like somebody was putting something over on me, like my real father had disappeared forever and, to fill the gap, some other guy was sent to me in his shape.”

“But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.”

“Everything we had built up came crashing down. In one split second, everything turned into nothing.”