I don't have my Didion here (The Year of Magical Thinking), but I know there's a brilliant, simple, clean line about the truest relationship between two (involved) people being like a lifelong conversation.

I learned of one ending some time ago and never had the opportunity to clarify why until earlier today. Maybe the conversation never really started. It was clear there was love and that it was real and that once its lifeline had been cut both parties were left empty and in the depths of something dark, but for now it could never be clear that that alone could really be enough. I know that one of the people dearest to me must have hurt, in that raw, flesh throbbing, gutteral moan kind of way, but this knowledge is in hindsight and reacting to history and not the present. Might it not have hurt at all?

But I know it did, and it does; I can see it in the distracted look in the face, the glassy, hollow stare and the short breathless pang. The other does really deserve to wake up beside someone who will find them exciting, and the person themself deserves to feel a rush - at the expense of such a clean but unnatural cut?