She has everything: a little boy, a brother, and a lover. She has warmth through the windows, from a sun that hides at times but not in grief. She has a home, and a life, fitted with smiles easily given without an edge as sharp as her blade.
And then, the layers are peeled away. She has nothing. She has a hole as thick as her son's young fist; as deep as a bullet wound; as long as the added reach of the katana in her hands. She has dead eyes in the faces cut in half, staring at her at the end of chains and rope.
Loss echoes and yet falls flat; grows silent with the absence of her son's voice and laughter. She pushes it down. Michonne deals with the pieces cut away like a surgeon; clamps down on the veins giving her grief life. She wraps the wounds in bandages; ties them tightly until they grow numb. Time whispers in her ear that she is healing. Those she surrounds herself with become salve and tape over scrapes and bruises that still fester and ache, and for awhile it's enough to let her keep moving.
But enough is never truly enough when even a home made of stone can burn to the ground, when it can let the dead inside more effectively than it can keep them out. The old bandages left unchanged are suddenly ripped wide and open, the numb scars coming back to life like a sleeping limb — and she is left bleeding again: left bleeding old brown clots and fresh reds and pus that masks the semblance of her life in the crowd of walkers.
The grief is raw and stinging, worse than before: old battles made her weak, it seems, and this time the world screams that she's already dead, just not rotting on the outside.
The hours that pass in shambling steps ache like days and miles, but then Michonne gazes into the cloudy eyes of an undead mirror, and the words her loss spits are lies; because when do the dead feel rage and fear? When does the sight of their double unnerve them with the truth? She's not dead yet, she's still painfully alive, and she wants to stay that way. She wants to follow footsteps in the dirt, follow the trail, to let herself hope for what little she can.
By the time her blade stops singing, by the time she's found the tracks, the wounds have clotted again, uncovered and dirty but lanced free of infection. When she finds the empty buildings and opened pudding can, the signs become fresh dressings and the scent of antiseptic.
And when she looks inside the window, seeing the two broken pieces of a home she'd been apart of? Her tears turn into alcohol, poured over the hole her son's tiny dead fist left behind. It hurts and hurts and hurts — but the relief is lasting and soothing, and she is alive enough to heal rather than fester. She isn't alone.
So Michonne knocks on the door, and the grief, finally, begins to fade away.