# Some Dependency Sought There is a peculiar comfort in dependence. We live as though independence were the highest good, yet we construct our days around intimate reliances—on the sun's rising, on words we've borrowed from the dead, on the steady pulse of another's presence. The paradox doesn't trouble us; we simply don't look at it. To be human is to be suspended between desire and need. A child reaches for its mother not because weakness demands it, but because in that reaching, something essential occurs—a recognition, perhaps, that we are not islands but archipelagos, connected by channels deeper than we name. We call this dependency when we wish to diminish it, but it is also the fabric of belonging. Consider the lover who claims independence yet hangs on every word, who builds cathedrals of meaning from a glance. Or the philosopher who sits alone with his books, unaware that he is in conversation with centuries, that his solitude is crowded with voices. We are never as alone as we imagine, never as self-sufficient as we pretend. This is not a lament. Rather, it is an observation that certain forms of dependency are not failures of character but expressions of our nature. We depend on language to think; on others to know ourselves; on the world to remind us we are alive. Some dependencies corrupt. Others elevate. The question, then, is not how to escape dependence—an impossible and perhaps undesirable task—but which dependencies we choose to honor, which we cultivate, and which we allow to wither. In this choosing lies a kind of freedom that independence alone can never offer.

I said I would weep bitterly; yet I could not weep as I had promised. There was pride even in that utterance. What power have I to weep? I abandon you, and I have grown so accustomed to your absence that it scarcely wounds me. Dryness and indifference have become the very breath of my soul; I dwell in this state most of the time. To yearn for you, to be near you—for me it is merely a passing pleasure. And yet you leave something in my being, some longing... shall I call it longing? Or shall I call it an ideal?... that will not let me rest easy in your absence.

While I remain apart from you, again and again I sense that I am in dire straits, and wish this wretchedness would pass. Is this too your pull upon me? You will it, and I am drawn into you—is not this very unhappiness an inkling of that, that I cannot be content away from you? If I truly understood this pull, would there be sorrow at all? Whether I understand it or not, by the force of this draw I shall one day be yours, inevitably yours.

The perfection of your creation lies in this: that man shall know you and love you, that love for you shall be his very breath. And it is upon this draw that I rely. I begin to feel it, little by little; in time I shall feel it more truly. Then one day I shall enter so deeply into you that I shall never emerge. Not through my striving, not through my tears, shall I become yours; only through your will, only through your effort, shall I become yours.

When you drew me forth from your heart and made me separate—that undividedness before creation exists no more; division has arisen. Do you think it will take some time to bring unity within this division? Strange is your sport—from undividedness to division, and from division back to undividedness! I rely upon your divine play alone.

However much I abandon you, forget you, in this very abandonment and forgetting you remain present; you do not release me, do not forget me, and you labor precisely to make my forsaking and forgetting of you impossible. I depend upon your grace—grant me this dependence.