"Aching emptiness" just gave me a little shiver of pleasure-- not for your pain, but for the memory of what it's like to feel that way. My internal world for a long time was like an emotional desert, I was pretty numb, it was functional at the time for my workaholic self finishing my graduate education. Then I learned to start feeling, and that was pretty horrible and dysfunctional for awhile, until I could settle into it and ride with it to a place where it wasn't overwhelming. Maybe it's age, maybe it's going through big grief, maybe it's this round of therapy, but now feeling these historical feelings is like attending a kind of homecoming. If I'm lucky, it's on that invisible edge of pleasure and pain like a massage that is stretching and loosening, hurting until I'm about to say enough, then it shifts into a tiny bliss.