The Perfect Sunday

Today was perfect and almost nothing happened, which is probably exactly why it was perfect. I woke up late enough that the light was already properly inside the bedroom, stayed under the duvet for another ten minutes simply because I could, then eventually followed the smell of coffee and found Yuri in the kitchen looking considerably more awake than I felt. Sunday has become the one day when I refuse to negotiate with clocks unless there is an actual reason, and today there wasn’t. Breakfast happened late, shower happened later, and I spent most of the morning in jeans, mascara, a little gloss and hair tied back with absolutely no intention of making myself more presentable than necessary. Country music was playing while I moved around the house, first Dolly, then Emmylou, then something else because my playlists have no respect for genre continuity. Yuri barely reacts to country anymore. He has accepted that he lives with a woman who can go from Dolly Parton to hardcore without experiencing any internal contradiction whatsoever. I consider this personal growth on his part.

Laundry happened, which is not the sort of sentence anybody writes when trying to make a life sound fascinating, but I have reached the age where fresh sheets genuinely improve my mood. I changed the bed and immediately started looking forward to getting back into it tonight. I cleaned the bathroom, sorted clothes, found an earring I thought I had lost weeks ago and reacted as though an important missing person had returned home. Yuri did his share of everything and I am recording this because if he ever reads the archive he will otherwise accuse me of writing myself as the only person who knows how a washing machine works. At some point we were both standing in the bedroom folding things and he held up one of my tops with the expression he reserves for clothing he cannot understand structurally. I took it from him before he could attempt to fold it into some geometrically offensive shape.

At five I made tea and put exactly four biscuits on the plate. Some rituals survive every version of a life. I sat near the window because the afternoon light was beautiful, ate them slowly and wandered around online without looking for anything in particular. Yuri passed behind me, looked at the biscuits, extended one hand toward the plate and stopped just before touching one. I looked up. He looked at me. His hand retreated. «Good.» He called me insane and kept walking. Thirteen years and he has finally understood that there are boundaries even love should not cross.

Mom called while I was still drinking tea. We talked for nearly an hour and said almost nothing that would qualify as important from the outside. Clothes, work, something she had seen, my hair, something I bought yesterday, whether I was eating properly, because apparently being thirty does not remove the possibility that I have somehow forgotten food exists. She told me something that made me laugh loudly enough for Yuri to look over from the other side of the room, and for a moment I could see her perfectly in my head, the expression she makes when she knows she has said something funny, the movement of one hand, the elegant way she somehow manages to look composed even at home, Angel arriving in my memory before I consciously think about perfume. Then we said goodbye and Amsterdam came back around me without any dramatic transition. I used to feel the distance more sharply after calls. Now Milano fits inside an hour of conversation and remains there after I put the phone down. It doesn’t disappear just because I am not physically inside it.

Dad called later and naturally required far fewer words to establish that everybody remained alive. Work fine. Yuri fine. Bicycle fine. Me fine. Yes, Dad, everything fine. Sampdoria entered the conversation because Sampdoria has apparently been granted permanent residence inside all telephone calls with my father. When we hung up I realised both of my parents had independently checked on me during the same Sunday afternoon, as though they were working from a secret rota neither had disclosed.

Yuri and I went for a walk in the evening without the camera, without shopping bags and without any purpose. Amsterdam looked soft and green and completely lived-in. People sitting outside, people carrying food home, bicycles everywhere, windows open, boats moving slowly enough that nobody seemed in a hurry to reach anything. I saw a woman wearing incredible shoes and turned my head for slightly too long. Yuri noticed. «No.» I told him I hadn’t said anything. «You were thinking.» Apparently thought crime has now entered our relationship. We came home, ate, left the windows open and did almost nothing for the rest of the night. Sofa, shower, laptop, bits of conversation, him moving through the room while I read something, me getting up to drink water and forgetting why I had stood up before remembering again.

I keep trying to identify what made today perfect and there is nothing useful to point at. Nobody surprised me. Nothing arrived. We didn’t travel anywhere. I didn’t buy anything important or receive news that changed my life. Everybody I love was simply where they were supposed to be. Mom was Mom in Milano. Dad was Dad in Genova. Yuri was moving through the same rooms as me. Amsterdam was outside the window without asking to be admired. I had clean sheets, four biscuits, sunlight, stupid jokes and a lost earring returned from the dead. The bedroom window is open a little now and the fresh sheets are waiting, and I can already feel the cool side of the pillow in my imagination.

Remember me, Eclipse.