Echo

The most mind-bogglingly obvious features of anything are the flaws, when viewed from a critical vantage. Our soul selves harbor needs, wants, and our minute foibles like baubles and broaches of indefinable value. Every time I write, I cringe at the glaring weaknesses of the English language with regards to relational linguistics: love, needs, wants, hopes, dreams - the words falter beneath the scope of what I crave to mean.
Needs. Wants. I wish there was a stratus of grey between these saturated extremes. I'm trying to navigate desires with a shoddy sextant beneath a sky of foreign stars. At least I feel like that's so, though feelings, too, are foreign features in this enigmatic landscape of the soul. Needs I categorize too closely to actual body requirements: food, sleep, water. If asked what I need, I usually reply "nothing." I'm not dying, am I? Sure there are psychological, physiological, emotional, psychosocial, biological imperatives, but are these moment-by-moment needs? Can I survive a day in no-space without these being met?
The next difficulty is "wants". Without the capacity for transforming those crude "scientific" terms into meaningful terms (a hug, a debriefing, a held hand), wants start feeling selfish, rude, and narcissistic. I'm staring into a pond, delighted at the beauty of my reflected face, wanting only to touch up the rippling water and clarify my own existence - how boorish and egocentric. But because these words: "needs" and "wants" are equivocated within my understanding, I cannot dissect my desires, necessities, hopes, dreams, passions, angsts, fears, failures, ennui, listlessness, pain, and tensions into queries and actions aimed at balancing out the terrible into the tolerable.
Christendom has instilled in me a refusal to accept empathy as selfishness, and a nervousness about help, and this bitter misunderstanding has transformed loving-kindness into a farcical facade of pity. Not in hindsight, but at the casual inquiry - I never need, I shall not want. If I'm lying down in green pastures and led beside still waters, either my wants must be illusory or faithless, or out of line with belief.