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No matter how anticipated, loss was a shock. Not death - that could be reframed, polished, personified in dilapidated mausoleums and tear-stained tissues. But loss, real grief, it struck so fast and crashed so hard. It was like a shark attack, the deep, ridged teeth digging and tearing at your unsuspecting flesh. You were left pooled in blood, unsatisfying to the realisation of a creature that abandoned you to slowly suffocate.
Drowning. Like a block tied to your foot, holding you just below the surface, taunting you with the possibility of relief. Only to look down and realise you’re the one holding onto the bottom.
Julian didn’t feel it immediately. The shock, a pump of adrenaline to his nonexistent heart, if he could get such bodily reactions. He had all the fixtures of someone who could - his eyes widened, muscles tightening as if holding himself in place, taking in the image of Mary drifting above. The soft ‘woosh’ of her body coupled with the golden tinge to her form was almost angelic. And she deserved it too, to be in that angelic light. She’d always deserved it, even when she was persecuted for the opposite.
Maybe it was wrong to be angry. He knew that’s not really what he wanted to feel, but he didn’t want to feel any of it. It was somehow easier to express the white hot burning of rage than the somber silence of sadness. He almost wished he could throw things, to let the anger pulsate in his being, let it expand and consume his judgement until it had completely drained out of him. Then maybe he could really move on, and stick this horrible moment in the past.
He knew it was, at the least, a disservice to her by dismissing it so quickly. But there was simply nothing else he could do. Holding on, dwelling on those empty places where she was supposed to sit and speak, it only made things worse. Knowing she would’ve loved something, or perhaps loathed it enough to speak her mind. Knowing that it had all seemed so pointless before, so uninteresting, only to long for it as much as he once disliked it. Julian was hedonistic, utterly selfish, but even he knew in the worst moments when he should’ve held onto something rather than be petty.
But this wasn’t a worthy investment or a spiteful little secretary with incriminating photographs. This was unbelievable, immovable grief. And there was no place for that to rest, no rationalisation to console yourself, when the only thing that would take the pain away was the thing that hurt the most, and something unchangeable.
That’s why he was so angry. His whole life, he’d had blatant control over his wants and needs. It wasn’t a matter of others, but more what he could get from others. Maybe he’d got so swept up in one world that he forgot he could be affected by another. Then again, he never expected to be in anyone else’s world. Unless it benefited him, and death wasn’t supposed to benefit him. Simultaneously, he felt that there was no group he’d rather stand by him as he fell apart. As he felt them fall apart too.
Frustration was the immediate, a biological urge to destroy when caused psychological distress. But the root of his problem was so overwhelming that even his instincts seemed foreign. Even the function of waking, of working between rooms was tainted with the knowledge that she surely wouldn’t be doing it too.
It was so incessant, so pointed. Like shards that lay underneath your feet, knowing that one movement result in a cut. He almost wanted to walk on the glass just to have physical pain, because that was fixable. You could wrap the bandage, disinfect - you couldn’t put a bandaid on dead people. That lack of control was equally flexing and inevitable.
It left him with nothing else to do. He could scream, he could fight, falling on deaf ears. There was no point in expressing both nothing and everything. It was inconceivable. If he knew she missed him too, in her own way, or was happy for him, it would only make him feel disgusted that she was there and he was ‘alive’, so to speak. He’d never felt more mortal yet immortal in his existence.
Loss was all-consuming. And he was going to break things to prove it.