most romantics will ask the question “what is your perfect sunday?” because they saw some version of it in the NYTimes’ The 36 Questions That Lead to Love list or because it caught their eye in Hinge’s automated written prompts or maybe because that line from Hot Fuzz always makes them giggle.

and most romantics will answer that very question with some idealized version of a seemingly glorious sabbath day. always idyllic, sometimes whimsical, but never practical.

i, too, am a romantic. i, too, love to dream.

but, for me, the perfect sunday isn’t one that can be dreamt up.

the perfect sunday is the one you didn’t know you needed until that moment in bed, right before you close your eyes.

the sunday where you wake up early to your arms already stretched over head, grasping at the morning. hello world, they seem to say, as you feel the energy flow through your legs and flex your feet.

you get up. you look in the mirror. you swear off any existential dread. you begin the day.

you grab your toothbrush and turn on your favorite song. favorite is relative because you will play that song on loop for three days and then never listen to it again until three months later. you turn up the volume.

you make small talk about hometowns at the coffee shop waiting for your cappuccino. “rhode island? that sounds like a dream,” you say to the barista. “it is, you’d fit right in,” he replies and you wonder what that means.

you tell yourself they only like you because you drink whole milk in a city that loves white liquids from nuts and oats and anything and everything but a cow. you are being naive, but you know that.

it’s low tide so you decide to take your coffee for a walk on the beach. you stand still for a moment as the water kisses your toes. fuck, you miss him. or her or whomever you can no longer have.

you call your mom. she yaps. you yap, too. hell, you’re both yappers and suddenly you’re at the jetty a mile and a half from where you started without any sunscreen on your shoulders. that’s a good yap, even if you don’t tell her that last part.

on the way back, you run into an old friend. you surf the small swell together for hours and catch up in between waves. the breaks in conversation that would be awkward on land translate to a thoughtfulness and patience only possible in the water. ah, how you love the water.

you are home wiping the sand off your calves when your phone buzzes. “costco?” it reads. you slip on your shoes instead of hopping in the shower.

the three of you browse up and down the aisles, giggling as you avoid the carts and the chaos and any talk about his breakup or her father or your existential dread that you swore off that morning. costco is too sacred of a ground for some topics.

you grab a box of peaches, a bottle of wine, and a bag of avocados. you are convinced you need nothing else, both in that moment and in life. you, you tell yourself, are of little wants and fewer needs. then you see the dark chocolate.

the three of you play that familiar game of tetris as you load up the car. it’s a man’s game, but she’s got it down good. stack the celsius this way, sturdy the eggs that way, don’t put the blueberries anywhere they could spill. 

you realize how much you bought and wonder if someone will make a sly little capitalism remark. instead he mentions his breakup, she her father, and you your dread. there’s something so intimate about passing costo-sized groceries between your hands and into the trunk of a land rover as you melt in the heat together.

once the trunk slams shut, the three of you exhale. you feel good. you all feel good. you feel the same joie de vivre of your early twenties, but now in a parking lot running errands and not at Shore Bar drinking on a sunday afternoon.

“should we go, though?” she asks. “for old time’s sake? maybe,” he schemes. you turn on the new billie and charli song about underwear and roll down the windows.

two hours later, the three of you are not at Shore Bar. instead you sit around her kitchen table with your laptops open because your modern day joie de vivre cannot be separated from the work that you love. c’est la vie.

you slice the peaches and the avocados. you pour the glasses of wine. you sing that father john misty song so off pitch it hurts even your own ears and then you all laugh and laugh and sing some more.

the golden hour sun dances on the walls. the echoes of the drum circle on the beach begin to drown out the click-clack on the keyboards in between sips of sauvignon blanc. you’ve been productive enough, you say to yourselves.

you grab your boards and your headphones and each queue up your own songs. you weave in and out of crowds from westminster to the pier. you realize that you can learn a lot about a person by how they handle the venice beach boardwalk on an august sunday night, even after years of knowing them.

you watch the sun disappear behind the mountains. you look back to the hundreds of people scattered on the shore, gaze fixed to where yours just was, witnessing the same exact sunset but experiencing it entirely differently. wild how that happens, with sunsets and with life.

you skate back. you grill steak. you get ready for bed.

and you feel light and free and full of optimism and hope and everything else you didn’t know you needed until this exact moment in bed, right before you close your eyes.