sundays

I have a thing with a few friends of mine.

Every Sunday is 'girls day'. We get up, we pile into the car and we head down to what has been branded as "our place" - where the owner knows us by name and the coffee is exceptional and the food is fantastic and we sit and we have breakfast. Or lunch - as it may.

And afterwards, we pile back into the car, mentioning how full we are...and we trot off. Sometimes we shop, sometimes we just go back to Rachel's house and pile up on the bed and watch reality TV until it's late and we're hungry again and we make dinner and move ourselves into the living room for the all star lineup: More reality TV with 'The Two Corey's', a dose of 'Army Wives' and rounding it out with the MVP: 'Rock of Love' with Bret Michaels.

In between, we scour ITunes for as many songs to purchase as we can...we work on homework or stories for the paper or housework - each of us doing our own little things...together.

And when the weeks are long and crowded and I don't get much time to talk to my friends - much less see them - I always know that I'll have that Sunday to look forward to. And it has become my favorite day.

"Girls," Rachel said last week over dinner. "I love our Sundays. So let's keep doing them, okay?"

I have found myself lately a victim of too much retrospect. I keep thinking back to times that no longer exist but in my own memory. Conversations with my grandfather, arguments with my mother, the distance of my father... I keep going back to slinging ice cream with Kim & Andrea and working the same shift as Kim...driving for hours after getting off of work and talking the way best friends do. Spending an insane amount of money at Walmart on things we probably couldn't even find today.

And I miss it. And I wish I could trap them all and give them their own special day. A day for me to revel in all of the parts of them that I love so much. My grandfather's wisdom, my mother's optimism, Kim's neurosis.

Days like these...mean something. They are what mend the wounds that we can pick up throughout the week. They're what heal us and remind us of what it means to be someone's friend - a relationship that comes without the strings and attachments that are packed away with relatives and significant others and even children. And this morning, stepping out of this shower, thinking about all the pasts and all the present tenses - the Sundays and all - I felt this overwhelming sense of knowing. Knowing the little pieces of me that can so easily become lost. Sometimes we only get those feelings for a fleeting moment - like the memory of an old love. We usually can't pull it all in, write it all down, before it's all gone. But we can feel it. And when we do...it is truly healing.

Everybody should have a day.