Do Not Throw Me Away, You May Need Me Some Day

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“His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone…” –  Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud.

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Don’t throw me away you, you may need me some day! cautioned the card as I carried it gingerly between my fingertips towards the fireplace wherein hungry flames beckoned for me to feed them more fuel lest they might starve and die away.

I was momentarily uncertain…

Uncertain of what to feel as I read the words upon the card.

Was I meant to feel relieved and grateful that someone had preempted my future need? Or was I supposed to panic and cling to this lifesaver just in case my life needed saving?

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“I could never throw Love out of the window.” ― Arthur Rimbaud

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My eyes had scanned the words with little interest.

Someone wanted me to hire them to clean my windows. How rude to infer that my windows are dirty! I clean my own windows and this is a slap in my face. But I don’t always accept challenges to a duel, as if I did I’d probably be too dead by now to receive and then read this card.

A hint of scorn could be perceived glinting within my darkened eyes had anyone been looking at them that closely or at all, this was, after all, another piece of unsolicited and unwanted junk mail, another tree killed in vain… glorious pursuit. One which I had received once before, the day before thus I remembered it all too well and it had not yet been thrown out by my mind as it wiped my memory banks to make more room for other random things yet to be noticed.

But the trip between the front door, through which this missive had been popped, and the fireplace was a long and arduous journey of about five steps, and my mind grew weary and bored, prompting my eyes to read the card again.

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“He will never be satisfied,” writes one biographer…I know because I suffer from the same disease… He began by wanting to “see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything.”… ” – Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud

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You are right, I thought, I may need you some day… however if I kept everything and everyone I may need some day (but do not need now) there would be no room left for me in this house or perhaps even in this world. That is a rather selfish thought, I have those often and ultimately they may be my undoing. Some day I will be in need, the kind of need which I will be unable to meet myself, and I will need you to meet it for me… and on that some day I will regret what I did on this day.

Maybe my future self will write a letter to me, put it in a time traveling bottle, and it will reach me just after I have made the mistake which it will warn me not to make… the time travel postal system these days (or in those days far off in the land of some day) is not what it used to be. The postman still always rings twice, but the doorbell doesn’t register the second ring and the ears don’t register the first as anything other than tinnitus brought on by someone thinking about me, wondering why I have not called them in need, and perhaps thinking the worst of my silence and of me, and therefore of themselves using me to do so and hating me for being used by them in such a way.

Why have they not called me? I know they need their windows cleaned, I’ve seen their windows, judged them to be dirty. They need me, yet they seem not to know that they need me…

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“To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”

― Arthur Rimbaud

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Or I may be over-thinking this…
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“I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.” ― Arthur Rimbaud

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…this sign.

Perhaps the flames will know what to make of it… and what to feel…

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