Sundays Like Sand
Sunlight helps itself to the room, collecting in clean linen pockets along
the windowsill as if boasting. Sunday morning is unhurried sex with unbrushed
teeth, grins over pancakes, and books by the window. Sunday evening is sneering
disappointment. So much is lost during a day.
Jules is still asleep, one arm dangling over the mattress as if she were
touching the surface of a pond on a country summer afternoon, just to ripple
the sky. I make coffee while standing in my underwear. Feels like a plain white
mug kind of day.
The house is clean by some small miracle. Jules even put an artful bowl of
oranges in the middle of the table. I turn on some music, low so as not to wake
her, something improvised. Mornings are no time for orchestration. Too bad we
don’t get the newspaper anymore.
These are the moments I overlook so often, lived and loved in appropriate
balance only from memory.
“Do you remember that one spring morning when we lived in the city?
Before everything?” I’ll say this to Jules, five or six years on. “We
were young and healthy, just the two of us and that tiny little place with no
dishwasher.”
“Oh, it had a dishwasher,” she’ll say, “it was me.”
We’ll laugh, but it won’t be the kind of laughter that would feel perfect
right now. Laughter without weight or weariness.
“I miss those days,” I’ll say. These Sundays like sand, gliding
past fingers we can never squeeze tight enough, grains falling on creamy
journal paper with real ink, writing letters that need a stamp and a shoebox.
Jules will hug me. She always does, whether it’s desperate Friday or overbooked
Saturday or slippery Sunday. “I sure miss them,” I’ll repeat.
I miss it already.
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