Sunday

The afternoon has no errand and no guest, and the quiet is not the weather’s doing.

The long afternoon

Sunday does not need rain to become long. The light can be clear, the street full of other people’s errands, and the afternoon in your own rooms can still have no one it must meet. A woman near seventy may have liked a quiet Sunday once, when quiet was a door she had chosen to close. This is a different quiet. The hours stretch because company is missing, not because the sky has opinions. You are not failing the day by noticing that.

This page is that missing company. It is not the low mood of a grey Sunday, which lives under depression as rainy Sundays. Rain or shine, the subject here is loneliness: the chair that stays empty on an ordinary Sunday, with no feast to blame. Nor is it the evening after supper, told in after the house grew quiet. Nor is it a holiday; that page is holidays alone. Here the calendar is plain. It is Sunday, and no one is coming.

No cheer you have not earned

The world is fond of telling a solitary Sunday to brighten itself. You do not owe the afternoon a brighter face, or a neighbour a report that the day was pleasant. Gratitude and loneliness may occupy the same chair: the tea can be hot, and the hour can still be missing a voice that already knows your name. This page will not paste cheer over that. Unearned cheer is a kind of rudeness to the woman who is actually in the room.

Solitude you would have chosen tastes different from the afternoon that goes on because no one is coming. You are allowed to like one and to refuse to pretend the other is fine. A walk, if your body wants one and no one charged with your care has told you otherwise, is a walk. It is not a cure for wanting people. A lamp switched on before the room needs it is a decision, not a festival. Time will take its own length. You need not decorate it.

A bid the size of the truth

If you want a person, one bid is enough to name, and it is allowed to fail. A call you can bear. A note that does not apologize for existing. A hall, a service, a table where you may sit at the edge for an hour without auditioning for cheerfulness. You can leave. Failure is not proof that you are unfit for company. We will not teach you to coax, persuade, or manage anyone into being your Sunday. That would be a use of someone else’s mind, and this house does not do it. The part of you that calls the wish pathetic is unkind, and it is not accurate.

We will not promise you a friend by next Sunday, or by any Sunday. A page cannot send a person to the door. If the wish itself is the subject, the neighbouring essay is wanting a friend at seventy. If the feeling is a heaviness that has been staying through other days, the depression room is open, with its limits intact. You do not have to sort the afternoon into the correct doorway before you are welcome in either.

The empty Sunday is not a dose

If a medicine has been prescribed — an antidepressant, or any other medicine — an empty Sunday is not a reason to stop it, skip it, or change the dose. Loneliness is not evidence that care should be set aside until a visitor comes, and it is not a reason to abandon a prescribed plan in order to feel more like telephoning. Those questions belong with your clinician. Keep the plan until that clinician changes it with you. The page that says this in full is medicine and loneliness. This writing has not been medically reviewed. We do not keep stories of Sundays that were mended.

What you may do with the hour, beside that care, is small. Eat at the table, even when the other chair is empty. Say one true sentence, to a safe person or only to the room: the afternoon is long, and I would like company, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Then let the rest of Sunday remain uninvented. None of that fetches a guest. It is not therapy. If the day has become frightening, the next lines come before any further attempt to fill it.

If you need care

If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988 (https://988lifeline.org/) before you do anything else on this page. You do not need a tidy explanation, and you do not have to decide whether a long Sunday “counts.” If you are elsewhere, contact your local emergency number or a local crisis service. This page will not describe ways to harm yourself. A page cannot sit in the chair beside you. Please let a person do it.

If you are not in crisis, and the quiet has a heavier companion — a flatness, a narrowing of tomorrow, a tiredness sleep does not touch — take that companion to a clinician. Do not stop a prescribed antidepressant, or any other prescribed medicine, because the afternoon was empty. The longer essay on the subject itself is loneliness. The glossary defines loneliness and adjunct to care in words meant to be lifted out plainly. Short answers are in the FAQ. Nothing here is for sale, and no sentence here is a promise that a friend will come. This page is not yet medically reviewed.