Absence

Read something from "Age of Innocence" that could use to describe my state of mind that winter when I stayed with mum after 1.5 years of being away.

"... and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of reality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points-of-view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent - that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there."