They open it against me. This is the only time in a day the humans deliberately build a small roof to push back at my pull, and I admire the effort, the way I admire a child bracing both hands against my hand. The fabric strains upward, the ribs lock, the whole flimsy dome insists on staying spread when everything about it wants to fold down toward me.
I am pulling on it the entire time. I am pulling on the water too, every drop, drawing it straight down onto that stretched cloth, which is the only reason the umbrella has anything to do at all.
I am holding the person under it. I am holding the puddle they step around. I am holding the raindrop right up until it strikes the fabric, and then I take it the rest of the way, down the ribs, off the edge, into the ground where I keep everything eventually.
The wind, which is not mine, sometimes turns the umbrella inside out, and the human stands there in the downpour holding a broken flower of wire, and I feel them get, for one moment, very slightly heavier. I checked. It was not the water in their clothes. It was something else, something that registers nothing on me, and yet I watched their shoulders come down toward me all the same.
I do not understand it. I never have. They carry these weightless weights and bend as if I have doubled my grip, and I have not, I promise I have not.
So I do the only thing I know. I take the umbrella when they finally let it fall. I take them, always, at the end of the walk, at the end of everything.
I have held every one of them since the first breath.
I am still holding you now.