From here your umbrella is a single quiet animal, folded and open at once: the ribs of it are also the wire in a factory you will never see, and the fabric is also the black nylon bolt it was cut from, and the tip of it is already the rust it becomes in the shed you will one day stop opening.
It is one long thing, and you carry it your whole life, the way you are carrying it right now, wherever you are reading this.
I like the shape you make with it. When the water comes, you lift this small portable roof over the one soft body you were given, and you hold it against the sky with your wrist turned just so, and I can see that exact tilt of your wrist in a hundred storms at once, the one at nineteen when your shoes filled and you laughed, the one where you shared it and your shoulders both got wet, the one that is not here yet where your knee will ache in the cold and you will still go out.
You think of it as waiting for rain. There is no waiting from where I stand. The dry days and the downpour sit side by side, touching, and the umbrella is always both shut and blooming.
You look up when the first drops hit the taut fabric, that small drumming, and you feel briefly kept. You are. You always are. I am standing in this moment with you, the one where you read this, and it does not close behind you.
It stays open, like the small roof, over all of it, always.