Holidays - Winten (mp3)

Breakup songs are an important subgenre of Christmas music; this song is less playful than Coeur de Pirate’s Parfait Noël, less wistful than The Staves’ Home Alone, Too, and less gentle than Jenny Owen Youngs’ Maybe Next Year. It captures some of how I've felt about the two breakups of my thirties, each marking the painful and confusing end of a long-term relationship:

It is confusing, I knew you deeply, now we are nothing

Mae Martin has an awfully apt skit about breakups and dating in one’s thirties, which includes the lines:

I'm 35, he's 36, at this point we both have big exes in our past. We are never going to be the big ex for each other. We're never going to properly traumatize each other.

…

We were in bed one night, just having a nice lighthearted chat, and he goes, "Hey, if we had kids one day, what would we name our kids?" And, I don't know, at this point, I've had that conversation with so many people... Let me just wade through this graveyard of dead hypothetical children to try to get to the new hypothetical kids.

It bruises the attachment system, I think, to become invested in hypothetical kids, or other such finely-detailed futures, and then decide that those will never come to be. I’ve had four romantic relationships that lasted longer than four years, all of which have ended now; while the worst bruising is certainly that which was left by Zach’s death, each ending had its pain. Here is something I wrote in a letter to Zach, during the month after they died:

During one of our water breaks, scoping out a yellow 5.9 in the gym’s corner, I said, “I don’t know what lessons I want to learn from this. I feel like I mostly know lessons that I don’t want to learn.”

Anti-lesson: never get attached to anyone.

[My friend] and I agreed on this. You have to let yourself be vulnerable. Connecting with each other is kind of the point.

I’m not sure who wrote it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. My present state is unenviable; to have loved and not lost is clearly superior to either of the options presented. I just couldn’t have loved you as much as I did without becoming vulnerable to grief. Which is obvious. The potential for loss is the interest that accumulates on my investments in other people. I want to care about people and principles and projects. I wanted (I want) to care about you.

At the eulogy party, [our friend] read that best-known quote from The Fault in Our Stars: you don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

After one breakup, I became obsessed with a few poems from Sharon Olds’ book Stag’s Leap, including Known To Be Left. It includes the lines:

I guess that’s how people go on, without
knowing how. I am so ashamed
before my friends―to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.

I think part of what attracted me to this song was the echo of that poem in its second two lines:

I woke up and I felt ashamed... I guess I'll do this again

I do not feel ashamed of all the people I have loved, but I feel ashamed of how destructive it feels when love comes to an end. I do not know how to go on, how to do it again, but I know you have to. Finishing this quote-heavy letter with a bit from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory, a book that made me cry when I reread it earlier this year:

“You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on."

"What do you find on the other side? When you go on?"

She shrugged. "Your life again. What else?” 

Negotiating the terms of a life shared with others,
- Tessa