Johnny America

 

Sun­days Like Sand

by

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.

Filed under Fiction on April 18th, 2014

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