PIECES TOGETHER

‘I stood in front of her,’ she said, ‘“Tell me you love me,” I said, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t and that’s when I set the steel in me, against her.’
‘Your point being?’ I said.
Sitting in Nero’s Corn Street. An espresso, best in town, on the table in front of me, between us.
‘The point is,’ she said, ‘I have nothing for you, and never did.’
MahJong came up on the screen, ‘MahJong, that’s my life over then,’ I said.
On the way up the hill the full moon shone a beam at the city, on to the side of the buildings facing.
‘They glow when the street lights are out and it’s pitch black,’ I said.
She complained about the hill, ‘How much further?’
‘This is the best route,’ I said. ‘That’s why we came this way.’
She’s told me three times now and I still don’t understand.
‘It’s hard to feel the pain of emotional deprivation when there was always food on the table and a roof over your head,’ she said the last time, saying she thought I needed it spelling out. ‘How can you value what you were given when what you really needed you didn’t get?’
‘So,’ said a woman to my right, ‘it becomes inverted and poverty becomes a way of expressing that lack, saying, as it were, how hard it is, how under resourced you feel.’
Another set of thoughts and still, in the early hours of the morning staring into nothing after waking from a few hours of sleep, I can't put the pieces together.