Four of Cups, Reversed

You stare at the slip of paper that has escaped the rolled-up newspaper and landed on the coffee table in the living room. It's printed on thick cardstock, too thick to bend without folding creases into the face, too thin to serve as packaging. The illustration is upside down, a figure drinking from a goblet, surrounded by three others, one of which is tipped over, contents spilling in a small, grayscale puddle around it. It feels dark, accusatory, even though this figure has no resemblance with you. A different gender, and build, with eyes staring blankly beyond the rim of the goblet. You turn the card over. The back is geometric lines, connecting to points, not entirely unlike the way star signs are sketched into star maps. None of it seems familiar, despite, or perhaps because of your familiarity with the night sky. You know the sky looks different, depending on where you live. You don't think that's why this seems foreign to you. Instead, it's likely because it's nonsense. You open the newspaper, filter out the funny pages and take the rest with you. It's not like you don't like the funny pages, but it's Sunday, way past noon, and you've just made it out of bed, and that doesn't seem like a laughing matter. Nothing seems like a laughing matter. You take the paper into the kitchen to read, a form of misery entertainment to accompany breakfast. You've read once that watching TV while eating dinner is correlated with depression. You're not sure reading a paper during breakfast is qualitatively different. You suspect it isn't. The paper is a mix of news. Reports on statistics that feel like you knew things would turn out this way, fluff pieces on local events and the achievements of people that "will surely go very far.". The faces you recognize in print, you'd rather not recognize. Had you gotten up earlier, with more energy to spend on emotional outbursts, these faces might upset you. They don't, at least not today. By the time you flip the last page to the advertisements, the toasted bread with butter and jam has turned as stale as the text that filter into your brain through your passive glare. You keep reading, far into the ads, just so you don't have to think about the fact that the thing you're eating is neither good, nor is it healthy. By the time you've folded the newspaper into the bin, you've forgotten its content. Vagues notions will return to you each time you glimpse a headline, or a featured photograph on the crinkled-up paper, though those are barely more detailedthan what you would have figured at first glance, without reading any of the actual articles. Each page seems more like their own flavour in pale synesthetic imitation of the way you feel about the rubric that day. Except the ads. Those always have the same flavour: Resigned desperation.

You're familiar with that listless urgency that accompanies stray free minutes between appointments - or worse - between leaving for appointments. Nowhere to be, nothing to do, not nearly enough time to wind down properly, your mind already caught up in the details of the incoming itinerary. Sundays are like a big, unending version of this. It's very possible that there is - somewhere in the existential depths of ones lifetime - a bigger, cosmic version of this feeling. "Midlife crisis", you think it's probably called. The age where people buy boats and books on transcendental meditation. Luckily, this one's just Sunday. People really ought to have stuff to do on Sundays, seeing as they already have the day off. Most of them, anyways. People with important jobs, important enough that someone needs to be doing it at all hours of the day, every day, don't, admittedly, but the rest, the ones stuck in dead-end middle-mamagement positions countinf the days until retirement, even if they're in a four-digit range, those really ought to have stuff to do. Instead your Sundays are mostly spent avoiding people entirely. It's not entirely your fault, even if sometimes that thought worms its way into the foreground of your considerations. You know you could make more of an effort, but seeing as most of your attempts to have something to do, are met with some variation of "rest day", some more and some less venomous, you could hardly claim you were the only reason for the state of your Sundays. It gets exhausting to try, especially if you're the only who does. Almost better not to bother at all. Almost.

You notice one of your neighbours chewing out a group of very young children. You hear "Rest Day" somewhere in there and roll your eyes. Internally, at least. Perhaps the intention to do so doesn't reach your eyes. It's hard to tell these days. In passing you notice that slip of paper from earlier in the afternoon. It's somehow upside down again, as if that were the only way it was meant to be seen. A mediocre illustration on too expensive paper, upside down, just so a passerby might do a double take and look closer. You wrap it up in the funny pages and fold it into the bin, along with the rest of the newspaper.