An Ode to the Sunday Scaries
It’s Sunday night and you’re watching TV. It’s not your favorite show, but it’s the show that makes you feel the best, and that’s what you need on this tonight. Your mind starts to wander, as focus is less imperative the third or fourth time watching an episode. You sip a La Croix, hoping it’ll undo the damage of the weekend and make you a healthy, soft skinned, slim person like you were just a few days prior. It doesn’t. You glance at your phone, waiting for a response to the text you sent five hours ago, sadly realizing the excuses for not responding that you’d given your paramour were no longer valid and you are certainly being ignored. A series of “what ifs” run through your mind, and you somehow think back to that weird British show you’d been watching a few days ago in which the parents of a girl had paid off the boyfriend to never speak to her again, and for a moment you actually consider that possibility. Snapping back to reality, you blink twice and dismiss the thought before reopening your phone. With one hand over your eyes you glance at your mobile banking app and breathe a sigh of relief. Not bad you think to yourself, before realizing that the number you’d been so relieved to see just a moment ago was in fact what you owed on your credit card; not the balance in your checking account. Again, you force the negative thoughts out of your mind and try to focus on your show. Your favorite character complains about his job, so you naturally start to think about your own career since you’re a selfish human being that relates everything to your own experience, not because that’s the only experience you can speak to, but because it’s the only one you care about. You have a lot to catch up on, you realize, back tracking mentally to Friday afternoon when your excitement for the weekend and your penchant for living in the moment had caused you to ignore all assignments past lunch and spend the remainder of your day in a conference room discussing weekend plans while you and your work spouse hold notebooks and pretend to be doing something productive. Unfortunately your Sunday night attitude is far different, and the crushing reality that you have to make up all of that work as well as prepare for a heavy week of doing something you never thought you’d be doing for less money then you assumed adults typically make just to live in a place smaller than you thought was livable starts to sink in. You take a deep breath and a long sip of La Croix, swishing it around in your mouth. The spiral continues and suddenly you’re creating reasons in your mind why the girl you asked to prom said yes but then changed her mind that don’t point towards your lack of desirability as a person and you’re trying to convince yourself that when you told the waitress “you too” after she told you to enjoy your meal wasn’t that weird (it was that weird). You can’t help yourself. It’s the Sunday scaries and down the rabbit hole you go as Barney Stinson or Rachel Green or any fake person on the screen that has whittled your once magnificent vision down to the point where you can hardly see well enough to drive tries to distract you from your thoughts but fails miserably. Finally, your phone dings. Maybe it’s person you want it to be. It’s not. It’s your landlord, and he wants to know why you haven’t paid rent yet.