It's not the same but...

It’s not the same at all, and yet the feelings seem familiar. The world wasn’t in isolation; only I was. I was self-isolating before I had a word for it. I was hiding away from the world to protect them from me and me from them. To save me from having to muster energy I did not have to put on some kind of happy face in public. I didn’t have it in me, so I spent endless days in self-imposed isolation. Me and my pup getting out for at least one walk a day but otherwise tucking away in my house.

It was after my fiancé had died, and nothing in the world made sense. The world at large went on as usual, but for me, everything had changed. Everything stopped. There was no more predictability to life. There was no more fair. There were no promises or plans. There was mostly confusion, anxiety and a massive amount of pain. A “new normal” as people are calling it now, the idea of which I was in complete resistance too.

It’s not the same. I have far more security and comfort now. I have a loved one to isolate with. I have more certainty in these completely uncertain times, and still, it is familiar. When my man is at work, and it is just me and my pup, and I have been isolating for weeks now, the feelings are a distant relative of some I have felt before.

The thing about familiarity is it triggers all that has come before. Like a guiding presence that draws me down the path to the known emotion. Taking me down some type of dark memory lane. In some ways, maybe that prepared me for this. You might think. Sort of a, you know you can get through this you have been through worse kind of thing. But in other ways, this triggers that, and I am left asking myself is this emotion from this moment or that moment and in the end, the answers are hard to find, but the feelings are readily available.

I learnt the lesson years ago that we never know. We have no idea what is to come. When he died, and my world fell apart, I got the message that all you think is to come is make-believe. I learnt the very real truth that it mattered not the plans I had, that we had, or that he had. The universe had others and we were simply characters in a larger play we knew nothing about. And in that moment I could not make sense of my life, of his or the world, so I spent an immense amount of time alone in self-imposed isolation just trying to make it to the next day.
Of course, no one was looking at me should I go out, but I felt raw, as if I were out naked, and they could all see the wound. Like you might feel today coughing in the grocery store. So I did not leave my house. I watched way too much Netflix. I cried. I used music as a coping mechanism, I sat with my dog. I hiked endlessly. I felt feelings I thought would kill me, I wrote to him, and I talked to him. I did all I could to fill the hours and exhaust myself enough to hopefully get the reprieve of sleep.

It’s not the same, but I can feel the grief. As if the stage is just similar enough to allow for a sense of deja vu.
It is not at all the same, and still, I feel it.