So I was driving into work this morning, a little late, as a houseful of pets can make you, when I glimpsed something my brain pleaded with me not to see. It was Monday, stranded there beside the road, the sky ahead ominous with dark clouds, a big rain a-comin’.
I rode on past, even speeding up a little, pointedly looking the other way. But, alas. My innate dumbass decency got the better of me, as it too often has, and a block further along, I angrily turned around in a parking lot and went back to retrieve this sadsack day from the side of the road. It’ll be all right, I told myself. You can drop it just up ahead, at some destination of its choice.
Yet as I pulled up alongside Monday, I couldn’t help noticing the people in the other work-bound cars creeping past, sadly shaking their heads. Like they knew something I didn’t.
There was now a thin film of sweat on my face. My hands were clammy. Nothing to worry about, I told myself, a little desperately. Just a broken-down day that needs a little help. Your karmic bank account is about to be a few dollars richer.
Oh, ye, we, the deluded. Because I knew. We all know.
So, of course, now I’m stuck with this godforsaken chunk of ruinous time. It simply will not leave me. Not that I hadn’t kept suggesting places where I could let it out of the car — fast-food joints, business offices, apartment complexes, a single undeveloped patch of weeds.
“I’m good,” Monday would invariably say, its surprisingly sharp teeth clicking together like a slow-motion metronome. “Oh, I’m good, bro!”
At one point, at a stoplight, I tried physically pushing Monday out the passenger door with my feet, but the insidious bugger just held on, those gangly legs like strips of glue against the doorframe, and all the while laughing as if this was the best thing ever. So now my own feet hurt, to boot.
Limping through the flooded parking lot where I work — of course it had started raining like Noah’s own flood the moment Monday had settled into the car beside me — this bastard of a day kept nudging me out from beneath my own umbrella. I arrived inside soaked to the skin, my thermos swinging alongside me like a lantern of dim hope, with Monday in lockstep, dry as a bone of contention.
“You’re late,” my boss observed.
“It’s all Monday’s fault,” I said. Which should have been obvious.
“Well,” my boss grumbled in gross understatement. “All I know is you aren’t starting this week off very well.”
But now, hell.
This devilish hanger-on of a day looms ever over me, even as I type this. Its breath reeks like my own festering disappointment, and new coffee. The wretched fucker drank my goddamn coffee!
No other day had better so much as look at me between now and Friday.
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