Stubborn Sundays

There are two kinds of Sundays for me. The first kind is my favorite kind: silly, lazy, stretching out and on. Days where the world gives you a slow smile back, where one little moment unfolds into the next with graceful rhythm. If asked, I'd say that Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I like that it's a day of taking stock but also of sizing up. I was married on a Sunday. My favorite newspaper of the week comes on a Sunday. Brunch was made for Sundays, as are lazy nights in.

But Sundays can be the cruelest day, too. I usually know it's going to be one of those Sundays before I even get out of bed. There's a foreboding sense, even before looking at the time, that I should've gotten up earlier, because sleeping in means the day will just go by faster. As one hour turns into the next, there's a feeling of time running out, and I can all but hear the hourglass sand. Monday morning is sitting there on top of it all, squeezing out the space in my lungs and shadowing over even the smallest pleasures. There's no way of working out of a Sunday funk; you just slog through and wait for Monday to come. Which is depressing.

I'm not sure why I wake up some Sundays to this feeling of airlessness. It doesn't have a thing to do with Saturday night (which was terrific) or necessarily about what I'm facing Monday when I get to the office (more annoyances, but nothing terrible). It might be a combined effect of all the small things that are sitting there undone - that other work project I'm neglecting for the more pressing one, the last of the thank you cards, the dirty laundry taking over everything, the fact that post-wedding I can't seem to keep a regular workout schedule, the five or so organization projects that I can't seem to get around to, either.... Maybe it's about something bigger: the knowledge that I'm not doing what I should be doing with my workdays, the bigger problem that I don't know what I should do instead, the distance from our family and oldest friends, the sum of it all.

It's an odd quandary, to feel this lucky and to be this happy, yet still occasionally wake up to these same stubborn Sundays. I wish I knew how to make them feel a little more productive.