Great Expectations by Charles Dickens has a character named Miss Havisham.  Jilted by the groom at her wedding, she sits in her decaying wedding gown at the feast table--still covered with the meal--with a cake tunneled by mice.  I haven't read the novel, but I saw this dramatized in David Lean's 1946 adaptation.  Martita Hunt plays Miss Havisham perfectly: demented, but in control of her faculties, although her mind's entirely devoted to preserving a lost, never fulfilled ideal.  Surrounded by mold, the shit of vermin, cobwebs, and dead food remnants, Miss Havisham represents holding on, to an extreme extent, to the past.  She preserves a moment that almost was, instead of forgetting about the louse who backed out of marrying her.
     I've had Miss Havisham nights and days of thinking too much about what I wanted, but never came to pass.  Love, of course, is a terrible ache when it doesn't find fulfillment, or gets punched hard by some unforeseen circumstance.  I've been dumped, I've dumped.  I feel a psychic sympathy for both sides of that process.  I've gotten involved with women and then found the relationships lacking in intellectual interest.  When I was much younger, I couldn't handle emotional turmoil in a woman partner very well.  I wanted to back away from drama.  Years later, I tended to embrace the whole experience, putting up with situations and emotions in significant others that sometimes bewildered me, but didn't make me fly away, like Miss Havisham's fiancé.
     Getting dumped, of course, feels horrible.  The pain of separation, of not being able to touch that person again, or feel them close by, can be felt in the body like an illness.  Growing used to someone, to their nourishing aspects, when inverted in loss, causes agony when it's no longer there.  It's death.  It's a jilted woman in Dickens' novel holding on to something slowly disintegrating into atoms no longer held together into energy fields comprising a wedding feast.
     The beautiful things that never happen in your life hold on, with varying degrees of strength, paradoxically consisting of nothing, nowhere to be found, yet alive in memory of what could have been.

                                                                            Vic Neptune