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A sickly, intangible grime of black tingles up your spine and slithers down your throat as you face the scene before you. Carelessly discarded flesh. Grief? No, not for her.
John misinterprets you here, the reader misinterprets you here, the world does. Yourself. Even so, you can't get the words to stick, because neglect doesn't speak the language of love. He—try as he might with his beautiful heart—would never comprehend the loss of a "parent", only that of a parent. He lost a parent. You lost a problem.
But the problem is not solved. Indeed she has left it unsolved, jammed open as an elevator would with the same grating alarm ringing in your mind. There is no telling her all the ways she had ruined you. That hope of final leverage in your back-and-forth you once held as a pearl has been wrenched from her drink and pierced through the middle. You open your mouth and the language of a thousand grievances tumbles out, meant for no one but the husk that was once your mother.
There are no words for this disappointment, and so, you cannot speak in human tongues. The terrors are funny like that.
They also offer you bitter clarity that chills you to the core, numbing you from the inside out. What can be done but destroy? Yet this awareness brings you another step further from your sessionmates, one step closer to oblivion.
Grief. For yourself, what you could have had. You are young but it looks as if the future is set–you can see it laid out before you. It’s a grim mockery of the hero’s journey. There is no conclusion to this story. You are unresolved, you are shed of the problem, you are now the problem. There is no longer anyone to blame but yourself. You are the problem, always have been, even in death. You felt stronger emotions when Jaspers died than when looking at Mother’s corpse.
Eyes wide open now–John speaks to you but it flows right by–you understand completely. You stare, you stare, and you stare more. There is no grief after all. There is a thorny void where it should be, each pinprick another memory, each memory either smothered in silence or tinging with the clank of a bottle, and you have had enough. In the depths lie what could be affection if you got your weary, greyed hands on it to mash around with a wishing you frankly do not have. Instead, you stare and stare, and with a renewed resolve, patch the void with those very hands. Grief has no place here.