want and need

I wore a little silver (fake) crystal bracelet today.  It isn’t an expensive piece of jewelry.  I bought it because I like clear stones and I love bracelets — they look so delicate and feminine as they hang just so on the wrist.

I was driving to lunch when the cuff of my jacket fell away from my wrist and my car was dappled by colorful, dancing light.  The crystal acted as a prism and bent the sunlight into the myriad colors of the spectrum.  The swinging of the beads about my wrist strobed the light across the dash, the ceiling, my shirt, my face.

No matter how many times I read about refraction and reflection and dispersion and the speed of light, it still seems magical and mystical to me.  Someday I shall have a bedroom with a picture window and I will wake to dancing light every morning.

************************

A “real-life” friend and I recently had a conversation — really more of a heated, emotional discussion — regarding want vs. need.  She told me she doesn’t need me.  She doesn’t really need anyone.  Not her husband or children.  Not her friends.  “Oh, sure,” she said.  “I want my husband and children and friends and family.  I’d be devastated and hollowed out and there would always be a sadness in me without them.   But I don’t need them to go on living.”

I had a very emotional reaction.  Who wants to believe they aren’t needed?  Especially by someone that they need, themselves?  If I am not needed by the people I love the most, what’s to stop them from walking away and never looking back?  And leaving me wounded and alone.

“I need my friends and family.  I need you,” I insisted.

We agreed to talk about it further when we were both feeling a little less emotional, a little less misunderstood.  She talked to her husband, I talked to mine.  We both talked to the friends through whom we filter our ideas during their early evolution.   I sent her a video of Barbra Streisand’s People.  Clever, no?

Twenty four hours later and she conceded that maybe she just tries very hard not to need anyone and is loathe to admit she’s not fully self-sufficient, independent, and bullet-proof.  I admitted that I’d understood, to an extent, what she meant but had made the discussion especially difficult for her because I was hurt.

What we haggled over, at the core, was the meaning of the word need.  She believes need implies physical survival.  She won’t die if she doesn’t have us.  She will wake up every morning and keep walking and working and surviving.

***************************************

I consider myself to be like a ray of light.  I’m not worthless or without beauty, all on my own.  But I’m pretty normal.  Pretty invisible, most of the time.  The people I need, they’re prisms.  Just by sheer virtue of knowing them and loving and being loved by them, I am bent, manipulated, and transformed into something more beautiful, more colorful, more lovely.

Because of them, the ordinary, least developed parts of my character and personality are developed from an entirely different angle.  My tendency toward sensitivity and sadness is refracted into compassion and empathy.  My rather infuriating sarcastic tendencies are diffused into a gentler observational humor.  My clinginess transforms into a steadfast loyalty.  My leanings toward reclusivity are thwarted when friendship and light, goodness and love are strobed across the canvas of my life.

No, I won’t die without the people I love –even if I want to.  That’s not why I need them.  I need them because of who I am because they are in my life.  I need them to help polish my character and transform the parts of me that could be harsh and less than desirable into something soft and pleasant.

I need them to bring me outside of myself, to make the light I shine onto the world softer and gentler.   I need them to help me dapple the world with dancing light.

I need them.