When Friday rolls around, nothing in my bones shifts. Those 10 muscles don’t stretch out and up toward my eyes to make one mightily curved smile, because during a pandemic, when you’re blessed to work from home from sunup to sundown, the sun is merely an accessory to your mood and rarely the measuring tool of time it’s been for millennia prior.
Before this, Sundays were the one day of the week when it felt socially acceptable to close my eyes in the middle of the day, rest my head on my still warm pillow, eat too much and move too little. Even Saturdays didn’t carry that laze factor. Saturdays came with a social call to action. Another Saturday night and he ain’t got nobody. Get down get deeper and down. 10:15. 10:15.
But Pandemic Sunday—Pandemic Sunday has emerged the victor of productivity among its family of seven. It’s the one day I seem to make an attempt to plot, jot, dot, line. Push reset. Create intention for the days ahead until intention feels meaningless again (usually, sometime around Wednesday).
It’s also the one day of the week I let the guilt of old Sunday behavior on non Sundays eat me up. Remember last Monday morning, when you slept in and missed your deadline? How about the Thursday afternoon meeting you canceled for no real reason at all? Old Sunday behavior on a weekday makes for a hot pot of transgressions upon reflection.
Will I finish a book soon? The reading, not the writing. The writing is on hold, saved for the few moments in a day when I’m not fully depleted of energy, usually around nighttime when I hear nothing but crickets and the sounds of my dogs snoring quietly. Where does my energy go.
Can I be honest? I don’t know how to end this. I don’t even know where it starts, what it means, if it means. I suppose that’s exactly why I named this little letter my word vomit.
My Sunday is bleeding into my Monday soon, and I have a feeling I’ll be awake for the sunrise again, sitting in bed, plotting, jotting, dotting. For what, I don’t know.
—fiza
A big hug to paying subscribers Sam Kruger, Arielle Lewitt and Salima Makhani.