Sometimes this song is a celebration. Not this version. Here it’s just raw, hopeless longing.
I just want you for my own, more than you could ever know,
Make my wish come true: all I want for Christmas is you
At the end of the monochromatic music video, you can see a tear catch the light as it’s wending down Ingrid Michaelson’s cheek. I never used to cry like that.
People cry in very different ways and want very different kinds of comforting when they do. Zach and I described this as “crying preferences”.
Zach usually preferred to be left alone to cry. They didn’t appreciate generic phatic supportiveness, and they didn’t trust most people to come up with any solutions that they hadn’t already thought of. If people see you crying, they feel like they have to help, and so Zach would have to push down their feelings and act helped until the comforter would go away and they could start making progress on thinking through the problem on their own.
They cried quite a lot in front of me.
Sometimes it was my fault. Sometimes I’d come up with solutions that they hadn’t already thought of. There’s a pretty wide solution space when you talk to someone every day. I’m happy I often cleared their bar of “better than weeping alone my room”. I considered buying them a Frequent Crier Program patch:
My own (less-frequent) crying used to fall into two modes.
In the first, my eyes swim and my nose runs copiously. My preference is for people to acknowledge that I’m crying, but change nothing else about how we interact. (Except, perhaps, to hand me a handkerchief.)
In the second, I curl up on the nearest horizontal surface, non-verbal and sobbing. I appreciate someone being in the same room as me, indicating by their presence that they’re not appalled by my lack of composure. (Ideally reading a book or something so I don't feel like I'm inconveniencing them.)
Since Zach died, I mostly cry in a third way. My vision stays mostly clear. My face remains cool. But I figure tears must have been collecting in my eyes, because I feel them slipping down my cheek. I thought people only cried like that in movies, those neat little glinting lines down their faces.
(Maybe all my usual mess is just a result of counterproductive efforts to stay composed. I don’t fight the urge to cry about Zach.)
I don’t know what my crying preferences are for this new mode. There’s an impassable gulf between what I want and what I can have, and I don’t want to pretend it’s otherwise.
I just want you here tonight, holding on to me so tight.
What more can I do?
All I want for Christmas is you.
- Tessa