Monday is older than any of us.

It arrived before we were born into it, uninvited, and it will still be arriving long after we stop answering.

We don't choose the moment we recognize it. It chooses us — usually while we are doing something else entirely, something ordinary, something we will not remember afterward. What we remember is only the weight that followed. The nights we stayed up long after everyone else was asleep, rehearsing conversations we never had. The version of ourselves we kept promising to become, someday, quietly, without telling anyone the date.

Some of us paid for that silence with a person we loved. Some paid with a place that had finally started to feel like home. Some paid with nothing anyone else could see — only a slow, private falling-away, invisible from the outside, unbearable from within. By the time we understand what was happening to us, we are no longer asking why. We are only learning how to carry what is left.

But Monday is only one day. The calendar keeps moving. We build new lives on top of the old ones, the way cities are built on top of older cities. Yet some Mondays refuse to stay buried. Not because anything remarkable happened on them. Because we did.