If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array, Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away.
I know someday you'll have a beautiful life. I know you'll be a sun in somebody else's sky. But why can't it be mine?
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.