Parasitic love and the language of desire

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring.
Nathan Hill • The Nix
When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. The presence of want awakens in him [the lover] a nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn towards questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
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