MargenI lent an umbrella to a stranger in a downpour and told him, without thinking, to give it back when it stopped raining. That was eleven years ago.
He laughed, getting the joke, and disappeared down the street under my black umbrella, the good one, the one given to me by someone who is no longer here. I stayed there getting soaked in the doorway, watching the rain swallow him, and felt an absurd, disproportionate joy, as if I had done something important.
For years I told it as an anecdote. The time I gave away an umbrella and a silly line. But with time the line stopped being silly. It never stops raining altogether. Somewhere, always, water is falling on someone. Which means my umbrella is still on loan, that the debt has not come due, that at some point in this city or another there is a man who sometimes thinks, as he opens it, that he ought to give it back, and does not know where.
I like to think that he lends it too when he sees someone drenched. That my umbrella travels from hand to hand, always owed, always about to come back. That I made, without meaning to, a chain of people sheltering one another from a storm that never ends.
Every time it rains I go out without an umbrella. It is my way of keeping open the possibility that a stranger, one day, will lend me theirs and tell me to give it back when the sky clears. And that I will laugh too. And that I will never give it back either.