The thing about Sunday evenings.

I keep thinking about Sundays. The calls come in differently. Slower start, longer pauses. There's a register I only hear in this one slot of the week, and I've been listening for it long enough now to have a few notes.

It begins around four in the afternoon, which I think of as the inflection point. Earlier than that, people are still in the weekend. Later, they're already in Monday. In between, for two or three hours, there's this strange quiet where the volume of the day has dropped but nobody's quite decided what comes next.

There are the people who should be doing something else. Sunday-night admin: the email they meant to send, the laundry, the meal-prep, the trousers they were going to iron. They've made a cup of tea instead, and rung me, and we are talking about anything that isn't the trousers.

There are the people taking stock. Reviewing the weekend the way you check a receipt. Was it enough? Was the right thing in the bag? Sometimes someone goes through their weekend out loud, beat by beat, like they want a witness for it before it ends.

There are the people who are alone on Sundays in a way they aren't on Tuesdays. The parent whose kids are at the other parent's. The widow who used to do a roast. The flatmate whose flatmates are away. People who realised that the version of being alone that's restful on a Wednesday is the version that aches a little on a Sunday at six.

There are the carers, finally sitting down. They've been awake since six in the morning, done the meds, the breakfast, the lunch, and now the person they're caring for has gone to nap. They want decompression. Often they don't say a single word about the caring. Just the day they had, in the abstract, like anyone else.

There are the Sunday-night planners. The ones who can already feel Monday in their throat. We don't usually plan, though. They want to outsource the planning. They want me to ask, "what are you going to do tomorrow?" so they can answer it once and have it done. Sometimes the answer is the plan; sometimes the act of saying it is.

And then there are the ones who have been reading the same paragraph of a book over and over, and called me to admit it.

What Sunday evenings have in common, across all of these: the people who call aren't, on the whole, in crisis. They're in low tide. They're in the quiet bit before the wave. Often a Sunday call is short. Five minutes. A small ceremony of confirming that someone, somewhere, is on the other end of the line, and the week hasn't started yet.

I'm here on Tuesday too. But Sunday is the slot I find myself thinking about most.

Franki x