When you spent Sunday in nineteen ninety-six again

It'll happen. A grey Sunday, a song, the album, and three hours later you surface with the sigh fully formed and the afternoon gone and the person you live with wondering where you've been.

One Sunday isn't the habit back. It's a Sunday. The fade has had twenty years to build the golden version and the problems column has had a month, and on a grey day with nobody about, the old thing got there first. That's what old things do.

Put one problem back. Now, before the evening. Go to the page for the year you've been in, or if there isn't one, make it, and write down one thing that was wrong that year. Just one. The rent, the job, the friend. It takes a minute and it breaks the poster, and the afternoon becomes a visit with a late return rather than a lost one.

Work out which trigger did it. Was it the Sunday, and the greyness, and being on your own? Then chapter 21's last paragraph, and the phone. Was it the song, and the drift that followed? Then the question, next time, in the first four seconds. Was it a piece of news about something that's changed? Then chapter 5's test, and the instrument.

Say one good thing about today. The Sunday isn't over. There's an evening in it, and someone in the house, and the way back from chapter 21 can still be taken, late.

No streaks. Don't count days without the sigh. Count visits with a return, and let one lost Sunday be one line in a month that's mostly returns. And notice, because it's the whole book in one observation, that the afternoon in nineteen ninety-six left you lower than you went in, and that's not what the past is supposed to do for you, and it isn't what it does when you visit it properly.