Lonely Man of Winter - Sufjan Stevens
This newsletter started in 2012 as a series of e-mails to an ex-lover of mine. He hates Christmas. He throws up his hands and plays up his grinchy exasperation, but the problem isn’t scratchy tinsel or saccharine music; it’s that he hates disappointing people and he physically can’t be in two different homes for the holidays.
On our second date, I sized him up as perhaps too cynical for me, but seeming to wish he were less so. Suffused with the meddling optimism of a nineteen-year-old, I thought I could help. I find people more attractive if I see how to improve upon them; that’s not a sufficient condition, but it’s nice to have a story about how I might be good for someone.
Six years ago, I was typing at him how much I loved Christmas, and he was typing back how much he hated it, and I thought that maybe sending him a Christmas song every day would get him in the mood. Or at least be funny, or, at the very least, remind him that someone knew he wasn’t having a happy holiday.
This song reminds me of him. Because it’s Sufjan Stevens, sure, who I’d never really listened to before hearing Chicago played on his tinny laptop speakers. Because for a decade this song had only been heard at private listening parties, and that seems like the sort of thing he’d host, gathering audiophiles in a circle on his living room floor. Because I heard this lyric:
I know that you would wake up
With the sunny side touching your back
And I thought of waking up before him, of twisting my head on the pillow to see a sunbeam alighting on his shoulder, of hoping that, when he turned around to face me, I’d see that some of the tension had softened out of his cheeks.
We changed each other, naturally. I don’t know how to become close with someone without becoming new. Despite myself, and without much in the way of permission given or overarching plans, I keep blundering into being someone else. We changed; I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether we improved upon each other.
Oh, I would rate the future
if I could put a finger on it,
but I have no idea
if what I want is better than this