Sundays

I recently saw a TV commercial that extolled the merits of Sundays. I don’t even recall what product it advertised, just that it talked about how all good things seem to take place on this particular day of the week. To which I would respond: whoever wrote that commercial has clearly never been in a long-distance relationship.

For those whose love stretches across county or even state lines, Sunday is a toughie. It starts out well, usually with a leisurely sleep-in, maybe a nice brunch over which to recount the fun of the past thirty-six hours or so. This can be followed by an afternoon outing or perhaps snuggling on the couch in front of a movie. But inevitably the hands on the clock move too quickly and excitement and joy are edged out by concern over whether one’s contact lens case made it back into the toiletries bag and just how many minutes of togetherness can be eked out while leaving enough time to reach the airport or bus terminal or highway. Even before the last kiss, a pre-emptive loneliness sets in.

I have a friend who took such Sunday good-byes so hard that she sometimes had to call in sick to work on Monday. Happily, she and her then-boyfriend are now married and living together in Boston. One of Tay’s former coworkers, a Turkish physician, once spent six months training in the US while her husband, also a physician, continued his job in Istanbul. They missed each other so much that he made the 10-hour flight to see her four times during that half-year.

Tay and I, no strangers to the commuter relationship, breathed a sigh of relief back in 2007 when we finally moved in together up in Hanover, NH. When I was accepted to Stony Brook he moved down to Long Island with me. We thought that we had put the days of too-frequent good-byes and prolonged absences behind us.

Yet here we are, doing it again. I am spending my eight-week surgery rotation at a hospital about 35 miles from home, and given that my alarm starts my day at 4:30am, I opt to stay in the free student housing across the street from the hospital, returning home on weekends. It could be worse; at least we get to spend every weekend together, as well as the occasional weeknight when he drives in to have dinner with me and stay in the cramped twin bed from which we can hear the rumbling of trains and announcements from the nearby station throughout the night. Neither of us sleeps well, but we don’t sleep any better being apart.

When Friday arrives, each moment of traffic that eats away at my precious time at home is torture. Our rituals after my arrival hearken back to our early days: we go out to dinner – a luxury that we normally wouldn’t allow ourselves weekly - and it seems we can’t talk quickly enough to spill out everything we wish to recount from the week apart. (Despite multiple phone calls daily.) Saturdays are the best, as we find ourselves well rested with still more than 24 hours stretched out before us. But then Sunday dawns once more, and the usual frustrations of trying to cram in grocery shopping, cleaning, and all of the other to-do’s that can be pushed off no longer is complicated by the struggle to fit in that brunch. That outing. That extra snuggle time.

So I disagree with the commercial. For some of us, Sundays don’t contain everything pure and wonderful. Unless you count the fact that every Sunday night puts us that much closer to the end of the next week, when we can see the one we love once again.