Sunday feeling

You wake up a minute or two before your alarm and find that the morning’s tricked you. The sun smirks through the glass of your rain-stained windows and as you lie beneath blankets you feel the entire world is right there in front of you, within your reach. But it’s never quite like that, is it? Instead, the alarm ring deafens, reminding you of all you said you’d get done. Do you listen?

And then you start to realise that it’s become that time again. That time where everything just kind of sinks into the pit of your stomach. The feeling deepens around lunchtime as you flip the pages of a textbook you wish you could take the time to understand. It becomes more intense with each speck of dust growing on the gym membership card you pretend to use. I work out four to five days a week. Keep telling yourself that. It’s 4pm. Your sister took the dog for a walk –got tired of waiting for you. You reach for your phone because you “deserve a break”. But what have you done?

All those plans and promises you made, did you ever get to any of them? Or are they just there for the future that’s never quite as near as it seems? That voice inside your head lies to you, tells you you’ll start in five minutes. It soon becomes ten, and later fifteen. Time ticks, the seconds slip through your fingers.  

You spend your entire life telling yourself that you’ll do things. The question is: when? Shake that Sunday afternoon feeling, forget about the dread for the week ahead and look at it as another chance. Because it could be your last. So all those items on your bucket list, start checking them off.  Get on a bus you’ve never been on before, see where it takes you. Fall asleep to the sound of the rain. Order an entire pizza just for yourself and spend fifty cents on extra cheese because you know it’s what your heart desires. Watch all of the Harry Potter films in a single night and marvel at the magic – it doesn’t just have to be in the movies. Ask a stranger something, anything, look into their eyes and listen to their stories and realise that that is what life is all about. And all those promises you made, start keeping them. Because maybe then you’ll go to bed on a Sunday with the thrill of the next week spilling through your veins. Sundays shouldn’t be solemn, they should be worth something. Make them worth something.