On Having Needs
Late morning and I take a slow, unsteady walk to sit in the backyard, to listen to the wren and the dunnock and get some light. I could hear them singing a duet from the dark kitchen. It is cold out here and everything is parched and faded.
I move painfully to fetch a support for the peonies that have flopped over the path. I have been watering things when I can, worried that without something to drink, the early spring flowers - the cerinthe, the bleeding heart, the rosemary, the forget-me-not flowers of the brunnera - won’t be able to make enough nectar for the bees. A dry April is frightening and this is our third in a row. I have tried so hard to make this garden a banquet. I can look around me and see all my willing and see the garden’s bright determination too, but I know that the things around me aren’t getting what they need. There is a strange, sad companionship in knowing it. I understand this predicament.
It’s been a week since I came back from the embrace of Fraser’s home - our home - in Denmark, my first time there in over two years. I was loved, beautifully, and I learnt some hard, wonderful truths about the things I need.
I have felt guilty about my needs my whole life. They are both simple and horribly demanding, all at the same time. It is only with Fraser’s help and patience that I was able to roam outside the confines of bed and house while I was with him, to explore and live in a way I am entirely unable to do the rest of the time. And together we did roam, far and wild, as if I had wings. It turns out that there are many things I can do when I am with someone who I love and trust and who I don’t mind being vulnerable with. Someone to lift me when I shake, to balance me, push me, steer me, transport me, care for me through the loud, painful storms until I recover. My body alone is a very different thing to my body held, supported.
And then there are the quieter needs. My longing for rooms to rest and work in with good light and space and how I unfurl when I have them. How much I thrive when I have the freedom to stretch, twine, grip, grow, when I am watered and nourished, touched, supported, warm. Oh, I came alive under that big, wide sky and it helps no one to deny it.
I have always tried to convince myself that my needs are more like dreams: optional, best minimised or forgotten entirely if they cause trouble for others. But back here now in the small, shadowed yard with my flowers and the bees, I watch the clematis cling to its frame and stretch towards a patch of sunshine and my needs feel like only the most basic expressions of all, fundamental to life, and I do not feel ashamed to have them any more. It is my right as a living being to crave them.
We can only tell the truth here. My plants cannot water themselves, however fiercely they try to grow. Not all things can be done alone and not all needs can be met all the time, if at all. Perhaps our Aprils are dry now. We must watch and wait.
The brunnera is limp and drooping, its leaves beginning to curl. I find myself feeling grateful to it, for showing me simply and plainly what it needs. I am grateful to myself, too. Other plants tough it out, dying in ways you can’t see until it's too late to save them. I pull myself up on my walker to fetch the watering can. We will just keep talking to each other like this until it rains.