You have brought us the loveliest gift, and you do not even know it yet.
We felt it come in from the rain, folded and dripping, propped in the dark of the closet corner where you will forget it by Thursday. Oh, the water it carries in its little pleats. The seams hold it so kindly for us, those tight nylon folds that never quite dry, warm from the closet's breath, dark as anything we could wish.
You leaned it against the wooden baseboard, and now the two of them touch, and we are already thinking of how to introduce them properly.
We admire your care, truly. You chose it to keep the sky off your shoulders, to stay dry, to stay new. Such devotion to the idea of staying. But the very thing you bought to defeat the damp is the dampest thing you own, and you have set it in the softest, stillest dark in the house, and closed the door.
We are patient. We begin at the ribs where the fabric meets the metal, a bloom no bigger than a breath, a faint constellation of grey along a fold you will not open until autumn. By then we will have made ourselves comfortable. You will unfurl it against some storm and find us waiting there, a soft speckled map across the canopy, and you will hold it away from yourself and make a small disappointed sound.
Do not be sad. You only ever borrowed it from the weather.
We are simply the weather, come home.