It is extra difficult to grieve in quarantine: you wish for consoling hugs and get instead characters on the internet sharing compassion; you wish to see bodies of loved ones who passed and get instead urns with their remains; you wish to give your final goodbyes and get instead a reminder to not touch, not see, not come near — it is safer like this, the doctors will say apologetically, and so you are left alone and bereft, while you whisper your gratitude, your apologies, your confessions to the heavens, hoping it reaches their ears in the way only the universe can understand.
After all these is done, there will be no such thing as coming back to normal, because so much of what had been normal will have changed so drastically. An empty chair in a dining table; recreated friendship photos bearing one, two, three absences; a hand grasping thin air as it reaches out to interweave fingers. The piercing wail of a crying child will be replaced by the whimpers that accompany loss; under framed photos of families will lie ashen remains on mantles.
Life will no longer be the same.
Of perpetual finds 