Sad Sundays.

I sit and stare at the grey sky outside my bedroom window. The clouds loom overhead and I sigh.  It’s Sunday – the saddest day of the week.  I bring my knees up to my chest and look and play with the threads hanging off my sweatpants. They were a murky grey, just like the sky outside. My room, once full of light and life, has darkened, due to the storm forming outside.  I close my eyes.

People often ask me: “Why do you hate Sundays? They’re so relaxing!” or “What? Why Sunday? Why not Mondays?” – I often shrug and laugh tiredly. “They’re sad.” I reply. People often look confused and just say “fair enough”, clearly not interested enough to ask me why I think Sundays are sad. So, they leave the topic never bringing it up again – leaving it in the dark. Life carries on as normal.

Sad Sundays was a name I had invented when I was twelve, about four years ago. I live in a small town by the seaside, where it is constantly grey, raining, and stormy. The sea never looks blue, or even navy – it’s just a huge mesh of dirty greys and unappealing colours that ruin the softness and silkiness of the sea. I’d wake up at around eight, go downstairs and eat a bowl of cereal, and perhaps play some games or invite a friend round to watch TV. Things changed over the years, and as you grow older, you realize that you don’t notice such bad in the world when you’re twelve years old.

The summer I turned twelve, the week before my father and I would leave on holiday to France the following Monday morning, I sat on my windowsill and watched the world. Our house is facing the beach, about ten metres away from the sand. Of course it was a Sunday, and it was raining. Outside, I saw a little girl of about six playing with her older teenage brother. She had big blonde curly hair and was wearing a big fluffy pink jacket, trying to attract her brother’s attention by jumping up and down in the sand. The brother, from what I could see got annoyed, and got up, bending down to talk to the little girl, trying to tell her something. I heard my dad call me downstairs for lunch, so I left. I returned thirty minutes later, to find an ambulance by the sand, the teenage boy was soaking wet, sobbing over the little girl, who was soaking and lifeless. I later found out that the little girl had tried to show her brother she could swim while he had gone to say hello to a friend, however she had drowned, and her brother couldn’t save her in time. From then on, Sundays were called Sad Sundays. They were never the same again.