And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.

You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met.

A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness—the object or concept holding the visible together.

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.