What We Do on Sundays

Every Sunday at exactly 6:40 p.m., we set the table for three.

This is the ritual.

The time never changes, even when the light does. In summer, the sun still presses against the windows, lingering, curious. In winter, the room is already blue with evening, the corners soft and retreating. But the clock is firm. 6:40. Not earlier. Never later.

I place the plates. Ceramic, off-white, faintly cracked along the rim. One for me. One for Elias. One for the space between us.

Elias insists it must be centred.

“Otherwise it’s uneven,” he says, as if the table itself might notice.

The third plate has no food on it. It never has. Still, we warm it in the oven first, sliding it in for exactly three minutes while the soup simmers. Elias once tried four minutes and the plate came out too hot to touch. He dropped it. It shattered on the floor, clean and loud, like punctuation.

We did not speak for the rest of that evening.

Since then, it’s three minutes.

I set out the spoons next. Three of them, aligned parallel. Elias checks their distance from the plate edges, adjusting with the careful precision he uses nowhere else in his life. He is careless with his keys, his shoes, his promises. But the table must be correct.

We don’t talk much during preparation. Talking belongs to before and after, not during. That was another rule Elias introduced early on, when the ritual was still new enough to feel like something we were inventing together.

“When we talk while setting it up,” he said once, “it feels distracted.”

Distracted from what? I didn’t ask.

The first Sunday, I thought this was romantic.

That’s important to say. I need to remember that it began as something tender.

We had just moved in together. The apartment still smelled like fresh paint and cardboard. We didn’t own much yet; two chairs, one couch, a table we found on the curb and sanded down ourselves. Elias lit a candle and said he wanted us to start a tradition. Something that belonged only to us.

“Like an anchor,” he said. “So we don’t drift.”

I liked that. I still do, in theory.

Back then, the third plate was a joke.

“For future guests,” he said lightly. “Or for the version of us we’ll be in ten years.”

We laughed. We filled the two bowls generously and left the third empty as a symbol. A placeholder. It felt playful, intentional. Like something couples do when they’re serious about staying.

But jokes, I’ve learned, can be patient.

At 6:45, we sit.

Elias always sits first. He waits for me to mirror him before picking up his spoon. This part matters. He won’t begin until the symmetry is complete.

For the first few months, we ate normally. Soup, bread, sometimes pasta. Simple food that didn’t require too much attention. Elias would glance at the empty plate occasionally, smiling to himself. I followed his gaze, sharing the private meaning.

Then, gradually, things changed.

He stopped eating as much. Half his soup would remain untouched by the end. Then two-thirds. Then almost all of it.

“Are you not hungry?” I asked once.

He shrugged. “It’s not really about eating.”

I laughed, because that sounded philosophical, and Elias liked to sound philosophical. But I noticed he was watching the third plate more than his own.

The first time he spoke to it, I thought I’d misheard.

It was subtle. A low murmur between spoonfuls. A pause. Then a nod, as if acknowledging a response that hadn’t reached my ears.

I waited for him to explain.

He didn’t.

Instead, after dinner, he cleared the third plate first. Carefully. Reverently. As if it were the most important one.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and kissed the air above it.

That night, I lay awake listening to his breathing, trying to decide whether I had imagined it.

I didn’t bring it up the next Sunday. Or the one after that. Some things feel fragile in their early stages. I didn’t want to shatter whatever Elias was building.

But the ritual continued to grow, like something fed by repetition.

By the second year, we no longer served food to the third plate at all, not even symbolically. Instead, Elias would place a folded napkin beside it. White. Always white. He ironed them himself, creasing them sharply, precisely.

“The shape matters,” he said when I offered to help.

He began correcting me more often. The angle of the spoon. The distance between chairs. The way I breathed while sitting.

“You’re rushing,” he would say. Or, “You’re pulling away.”

From what, he never clarified.

Sometimes, when I arrived home late on Sundays, Elias would already be waiting by the table, tense, eyes flicking to the clock.

“Don’t break it,” he said once, not angrily, but with genuine fear. “Please.”

So I tried harder. I was careful. I adjusted myself to fit the ritual’s shape, convinced that love sometimes required discipline.

Still, there were moments.

Once, without thinking, I reached across the table and moved the third plate closer to me. Just a few centimetres. An accident.

Elias froze.

The silence that followed was thick, almost physical. He stood abruptly, knocking his chair backward, and picked up the plate with both hands.

“Don’t invite it closer,” he said.

His voice shook.

I wanted to ask what it was. I wanted to laugh it off, to say it was only a plate, only a habit that had grown teeth. But the fear in his eyes stopped me.

So instead, I apologized.

That was the first time I felt the ritual consuming something.

Not all at once. Slowly. Like erosion.

By the third year, Elias no longer looked at me during dinner. His attention belonged entirely to the space across from us. He nodded. He listened. He sometimes smiled in ways I hadn’t seen him smile at me in a long time.

Afterward, he would seem lighter, calmer. As if something had been fed.

I, on the other hand, felt hollowed out. Like a prop in my own home.

One Sunday, I didn’t come back.

I told him I was working late. It was a lie, but a small one. I sat alone in a café until well past 7, watching couples through the window, wondering when rituals turned into obligations.

When I finally returned, the apartment was dark.

The table was set.

All three plates were warm.

Elias stood in the corner, pale, eyes unfocused.

“You left it waiting,” he said.

I looked at the third plate.

For the first time, there was something on it.

Not food. Not exactly.

Something folded. Something white. Shaped like a napkin, but thicker. Heavier.

My chest tightened.

“What is that?” I asked.

Elias smiled, relieved. “You see it too.”

That night, I slept on the couch.

The following Sunday, I packed my things.

Elias didn’t stop me. He only asked one question, standing in the doorway, voice quiet.

“Will you still set the table?”

I didn’t answer.

I live alone now. My apartment is small. There’s barely space for a table at all. Still, every Sunday, at exactly 6:40 p.m., I feel a tightening in my chest.

Sometimes, without meaning to, I place my dinner plate carefully in the center.

Sometimes, I leave space beside it.

Just in case.

Because rituals, once learned, are difficult to unlearn.

And affection, repeated long enough, does not always disappear when the other person does.