Sunday comes in with the dawn, and I ignore it anyway. Sunday means Monday is round the corner. The waves keep coming, the years come and go in a tsunami of Sundays that disappear with the tide. Watch out! I dream of being in charge of a small army of children: small and in strollers, bigger and sturdy-legged. I call time. They freeze. Don’t move a muscle! I don’t want to lose any of you! I search the crowd for my children, but I cannot see them. They are lost in an avalanche of other people’s children. I wake panting in terror. I wake and reach for the light and look over to reassure myself it is all ok. But it isn’t and it never will be.
Sunday morning slides into a ditch, so I get up and make a cup of tea. I have a new teapot, it had been fixed, the handle had been broken off. The Japanese shopkeeper had fixed the handle with epoxy, and apologized. It had been fixed beautifully, you can tell it has been mended, but the fix itself was beautiful in it’s own right. She had papered over the cracks with something stronger, and assured me the pot worked perfectly well. She only wanted a few bucks, I took my once expensive discounted teapot with the epoxy fix and the crackle glaze lid in a cerulean green, I carried it home in a paper bag that the rain turned to pulp. One wrong wind and the pot would fall to the floor and shatter once again. Next time it might not be fixable.
And so it goes. Years lost. Sunday is the day of lost things. Sunday itself is lost. It doesn’t know what it is. Even when you work on a Sunday, another day just takes it’s place. Wednesday is our Saturday, I announce, and Thursday our Sunday. The Boy knows what I mean. He prefers to work through the conventional weekend, and we go out in the week when the crowds are working. Sunday knows this. Sunday just cheekily shifts itself to Thursday, declaring itself invited, sidling in bringing a tidal wave of lethargy. Thursday takes on a small note of Sunday in the way it smells. Meals are more extravagant, we turn on the TV, and sit on the beds with our feet up, my head on the Boy’s shoulder, we watch basketball, we watch football. We watch the baseball and reality TV shows about people who try to defeat Sunday by hoarding other days of the week. These days come in the form of teddy bears, or empty food cartons, of jugs of piss and bottles of shit. How the fuck do you shit in a bottle, I wonder out loud. The boy laughs in the way only teen males can: “carefully”, he answers. Smartass.
Sunday morning drips slowly, percolating, gathering the dregs and grounds of life it passes through like a sponge. The rest of the week behind it, Sunday is a nothing day, a lost day, a lazy day that falls and collects in a pot of days. At the end of life, I wonder if you see all your Sundays from childish ones of cartoons and your mother’s news shows, young free Sundays that disappear in hazes of come-downs and hangovers from vibrant alive bouncy Saturdays, I wonder if you see them poured out of the cup of life in a stream of lost time. Give me back my Sundays! Just make ’em Fridays! If I was to die, I expect I’ll die on a Sunday. I almost always almost dropped dead on a Sunday.
Yes, Sunday comes slowly and leaves on the breeze, evaporating into clouds just to fall again next week.
Save us from Sunday!