Last Blue Umbrella

Artwork by Nadjellah Mendoza

It was late afternoon when I stepped out of Flinders Street Station, my coat damp from the lingering drizzle. My fingers were still numb from the chill as I wandered towards the counter. The umbrella waited for me in the lost-and-found box like a promise: sky-blue, frayed at the edges and ribs crooked like old fingers. It leaned gently against the side of the box as though it had simply grown tired of being forgotten. Among the mismatched gloves and cracked phone cases, it pulsed with a quiet significance, as if holding a secret. 

I lifted it gently, reverently. The fabric was damp and smelled of mould, but there was jasmine too, faint and ghostly, as if the umbrella remembered a different rain. One that fell in monsoon rather than drizzle. 

The weight was wrong. Too heavy for mere cloth and steel. It carried something else. 

I stepped outside. Melbourne trembled beneath a curtain of rain. The city turned impressionist: tram lights and storefronts bleeding into the wet footpaths like oil paints. 

The umbrella opened with a whisper, and as it bloomed above me, the rain stopped touching my skin. Or perhaps I had slipped out of the weather altogether. It was then I realised – the umbrella itself was the threshold, the hinge between the known city and the one stitched from memory. 

At first, it was the smell. Not asphalt or diesel, but the intoxicating perfume of my grandmother's garden. I saw her, Amara, standing barefoot on a sun-drenched veranda, coaxing jasmine vines to climb trellises. Her hands were soil worn, and her eyes storm grey. She looked at me, not through me. Her mouth parted as if she might speak, but no sound came. Only the soft creak of the rocking chair behind her, and the wind brushing through the leaves, whispering words I couldn’t decipher. I stood frozen, watching the rise and fall of her breath, the dust motes suspended like stars in the golden light. 

Then the streetlight beside me flickered once and went out. 

When it came back on, she was gone, replaced by the faintest echo of temple bells and the distant murmur of monsoon frogs. But the scent lingered, thick in my lungs like grief. 

I walked on, my feet feeling less as if they belonged to me. The city warped subtly: tram tracks curled into narrow canals; fig trees burst through buildings, their branches veining out into the sky like ink in water. Rooftops bowed under the weight of birds I couldn’t name. Melbourne was becoming something else, something older, a city rewritten in the script of memory. 

An alley I had not noticed unfolded to my left, narrow and glowing with the soft shimmer of paper lanterns strung above like suspended moons. The air was warm here, heavy with cloves and cardamom and the scent of incense drifting from unseen altars. Children darted barefoot across cobblestones, giggling as they traced chalk mandalas onto the stones. 

At the alley’s end, an old man sat beneath a banyan tree whose roots clutched the market like memory clutches a name. He was weaving what looked like constellations into long sheets of silk-silver threads shimmering in impossible geometries. 

‘Want to remember something you’ve forgotten?’ he asked, without looking up. 

I nodded. 

He reached behind him and drew out a mirror the size of my palm. The glass was smudged, old, and held a faint bluish sheen like it had known moonlight. I hesitated before peering in. 

In it, I saw her – the girl I loved, the one I lost. She was seated on a tram, forehead pressed to the glass, her fingers tracing absentminded spirals in the fog. Her eyes met mine, not through reflection, but directly, as if the glass between us wasn’t glass but time made liquid. In that moment, I could only guess at what she was thinking, but her gaze held the weight of unspoken things. My breath caught. She smiled then, the smallest quiver of a smile, and the image vanished like condensation on a mirror wiped too fast. I saw her – the girl I loved, the one I lost. 

We met in a cinema, of all places – both of us ducking into the same row, hands brushing, laughter shared over a dropped popcorn tub. It was a Wednesday evening screening of a French film neither of us really understood, and somehow that made it sacred – our little conspiracy of confusion. 

Leila’s eyes were fierce and weary, as though she had loved before and it had cost her something she hadn’t gotten back. There was something perpetually unfinished about her, as though she were always in the middle of writing a letter she never intended to send. 

We stayed up for nights that blurred into weeks, sometimes in the quiet back corner of her favourite cafe, sometimes on my kitchen floor at three in the morning, talking about cities we had never touched – Istanbul, Prague, Kolkata – until they felt as real as the room around us. We spun mythologies from their streets, named imagined alleyways and wondered aloud which ghosts might be waiting for us there. 

We argued about God, about the cruelty of time, about whether love was meant to endure like stone or blaze and vanish like a struck match. We kissed with the urgency of people trying to overwrite old pain, layering one memory over another as if it could erase the scar beneath. 

Leila would draw spirals in the condensation on the cafe window, her fingertip trailing slow circles that seemed to catch and hold the hours we’d spent together. She said they reminded her of how time folds back on itself, how grief loops instead of fading. Some nights, we smoked in silence, the air between us dense with unspoken confessions. We promised nothing, yet the promise broke all the same. 

But love, in its infancy, is fragile. Like sugar glass. 

We cracked. She left. I never called. We both claimed the high road and walked it, parallel and silent, not daring to look across the divide. 

Now, in the market, she stood behind a curtain of rain-beads, reaching. Her hand shimmered as if made of light reflected on water. I reached back, heart roaring like a cathedral bell. My fingers met only air, but for a moment, I felt warmth – the echo of a palm pressed against mine in another life. 

I turned left, then right, and the night thickened into another memory. The buildings folded in on themselves like the pleats of a sari, and the street narrowed into a long corridor lined with doors. Each one bore a date etched in gold: my birthday, the day we first met, the night I walked away. Some glowed faintly, trembling candlelight. Others wept, dark stains beneath them like tears. The air smelled of old ink and sandalwood. 

I paused at a door labelled ‘23 August’, then stepped inside. 

It was my old university dorm room, unchanged in its cluttered disorder – a lava lamp burbling green, posters curling at the corners, a carpet poked with cigarette burns and philosophy books. On the bed is Leila, curled like a question mark, her fingers trailing across a page of Calvino. Her voice was soft, almost reverent, as she read aloud. 

I watched my younger self sit beside her. We were younger, leaner, louder. She looked up and smiled, that sideways tilt that meant she was about to say something devastating. We argued that night – about fate, about the gods, about whether heartbreak was predetermined or simply the price of being alive. She didn’t believe in destiny. I believed too much. 

She had fallen asleep before the argument could finish. I watched myself pull the blanket up over her shoulder and stare at the ceiling like it might offer an answer. 

The room began to dissolve, the posters peeling like bark, the light flickering to moth-warm dark. I reached for the doorknob and opened it into a different street – one I hadn’t walked since childhood, where the curbs were lined with hibiscus and the air was thick with the memory of mangoes. The umbrella in my hand began to hum, low and steady, like an old lullaby remembered too late. 

Bourke Street dissolved. 

In its place rose a forest of books, leather-bound and trembling in wind that smelled of ink, smoke, and something older – the scent of time pressed between pages. The shelves leaned into one another like old friends whispering secrets. I wandered among them slowly, fingers brushing spines that pulsed faintly with warmth. 

Some bore my name, etched in fading gold. Others carried the names of people I had betrayed or forgotten, names that pulled at me like old songs. A few were blank, waiting. Some cracked open slightly as I passed, releasing pages that fluttered around me like startled birds. 

A librarian without a face – just a body in a robe of moth-eaten velvet – appeared beside me and pointed to a wooden bench beneath an arched window. There sat a boy with a dented metal lunchbox resting on his knees. Me, at eight. 

He unwrapped the roti inside slowly, reverently, like opening a gift. I remembered the curve of hope on his face – waiting, searching the hallway for a man who would never arrive. My father had promised he'd come to the school play. He didn't. I saw the moment that truth landed in the boy’s chest: the shoulders straightened, the face stilled. He folded the foil carefully, put it back inside the box, and smiled – not from happiness, but as armour. 

I wanted to go to him, kneel down, tell him he didn’t have to learn resilience so young. But the rules of these in-between places didn’t allow for interference. Only witnessing. 

I wept silently. My body did not shake, but the umbrella did – a subtle quiver, like a muscle remembering pain. It was absorbing it all. Memory by memory. Grief by grief. 

Then came the room of unfinished letters. They floated in air like soft birds, drifting, folding, fluttering down – some crisp and clean, others yellowed and scorched at the edges, their ink bleeding into the margins like regret. 

The room had no walls, only a sky full of unsaid things. The ground was a patchwork of old diary pages, and the floorboards creaked with sentences that never made it past the throat. 

One letter opened mid-flight. It was from Leila, never sent: 

I miss you when it rains. I miss you when I try not to. 

The words struck like a chord I hadn’t realised was still vibrating in my chest. I reached out and caught another: 

You never saw how much I stayed, even when I left. 

And then another: 

You made me feel like the moon – luminous, distant, and never quite enough. 

I knelt to read them, my fingers trembling with the ache of recognition. These weren’t just hers. They were mine too. Letters I wrote in my head during tram rides and cold showers. Letters I screamed in dreams but never dared put to paper. 

I’m sorry I folded instead of fighting. 

I loved you more in silence than I ever did aloud. 

I kept the movie ticket. I still remember your laugh when the reel jammed. 

I stayed in that room for what felt like days, reading every letter I had never sent – apologies never voiced, love never confessed, grief never named. My name repeated in their margins like a prayer, or a warning. 

The umbrella rested against the desk like a companion, quiet and steady, glowing faintly at the seams. 

And I understood then. It wasn’t carrying water. It was carrying weight. All the unspoken. Every unshed tear, every withheld truth, every moment I had chosen to pretend instead of feel. It held them so I could finally let them go. 

I wandered further. Into a house made of memory, its corridors shifting like thought, its walls peppered with photographs I had never taken – blurred glimpses of parallel moments, smiles I don’t remember giving, hands I don’t remember holding. One hallway echoed with the sound of my mother's lullabies, played in reverse. 

In one room, a clock ticked backward, each second unravelling like thread. The walls were lined with calendars from different years, all marked with days that had changed me – the day Amara, my grandmother, died; the day Leila left; the day I decided to stay. 

In another, Amara sat on a rocking chair, her silhouette lit by the soft glow of a storm lamp. She was telling stories to a younger version of my mother who clutched a stuffed rabbit and listened as if the world depended on it. Her voice rose and fell like monsoon rain, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I felt their shape in my chest. 

I moved on. I found a kitchen where every smell from my childhood mingled in the air – turmeric, ghee, incense, rain. The warmth of freshly boiled milk clung to the walls. There were no windows. Only paintings of open skies. I stayed there for a while, pretending I still lived in those warm hues. I opened drawers full of handwritten recipes and half-burned letters. In the oven sat a cake we never ate. I watched it slowly rise in the heat of memory. 

A narrow stairway led me to a room under the roof. There I found my teenage self, sketching Leila's face in charcoal over and over, tearing each page, and beginning again. The sketches were angry. Desperate. Beautiful. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. I remembered how consumed I was, how love had become obsession, how pain sharpened the lines on every page. 

The umbrella began to leak light. Not like water, but like time breaking at the seams – small golden beams spilling through, falling onto the drawings, illuminating every version of her I had tried to preserve and failed. 

I emerged into Federation Square. But it wasn’t bustling. It was dusk – or dawn? – and filled only with statues. Not marble or bronze, but people I had loved and lost, captured mid-laughter, mid-tear, mid-leaving. Some were caught mid-step, as if frozen between destinations. Others reached toward things that no longer existed. 

Leila was there, seated on a park bench, sketchbook open in her lap, staring at something beyond the square. My mother stood with her back turned, apron strings loose, her body paused in the middle of a gesture – perhaps she was stirring something or waving goodbye. Amara, always composed, held a photo of her husband close to her chest like it was still warm. 

I moved slowly, reverently. Each statue was a moment, a memory rendered in flesh-toned stillness. Their eyes gleamed faintly, as though still watching, still waiting. 

One statue moved. 

It was me. 

Older. Weathered. Hair flecked with grey. Smiling slightly, a look of quiet, exhausted peace softening the lines of his face. He held an umbrella – not blue now, but white, like a monsoon sky emptied of rain. Its canopy glowed with a soft luminescence, casting gentle shadows onto the cobblestones. 

He looked at me – not through me, but into me – and nodded once. It wasn’t approval or warning. It was recognition. 

Then he turned and walked into the blur of the horizon. Not fading, but dissolving. I didn’t call after him. 

I understood. Some versions of us survive. Others don’t. And some walk ahead so that we may follow – one day, when we’re ready to leave the past behind. 

I returned to the Yarra, the river now thick with dark ink, rippling like the surface of an unwritten page. Beneath its skin, stories swam: unfinished ones, forgotten ones, the ones we were too afraid to write. I could hear them – not as words, but as music. Piano notes played in reverse, overlapping in eerie harmony, each note a memory trying to make its way back. 

I knelt at the edge of the river, and for a moment, I saw my reflection – fractured, flickering. Behind me, all the selves I had been: the boy who waited for his father, the teenager sketching Leila in charcoal, the version of me who walked away, the one who stayed. They gathered around me silently, watching. 

Then a bridge appeared where none had been – arched in stone and gold – its span impossibly long and delicate as a breath held between lives. I stepped onto it, the surface cool and humming beneath my feet. 

Each step forward felt like an unravelling. I remembered more than I ever meant to: the scent of my mother’s sari, the sound of my father’s cough, the way Leila once looked at me after we fought – eyes wide, hurt, but still hopeful. I carried all of it. 

On the other side, the rain resumed. But this time, I let it fall on me. I did not flinch. The umbrella remained closed in my hand, heavy with everything I had let it absorb – the silent letters, the memories folded into walls, the shadows of the people who shaped me. 

The city was whole again. But I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be. 

I had seen too much. Felt too much. Carried too many versions of love. 

Loved too deeply, even in absence. Especially in absence. 

I didn’t go home that night. I wandered until morning – not lost, but deliberately adrift – carrying the umbrella not as a shield but as a relic, a compass, a lantern held up to the past. A sky that remembered everything. Every hurt, every warmth, every name whispered at the edge of sleep. 

Somewhere between here and then, I found myself again. Not intact. Not repaired. But real. 

And when the sun finally rose, casting gold across the slick rooftops and tram rails, I opened the umbrella once more. Just to see what kind of sky it held. 

It was blue. Not the blue of sorrow or forgetting. But the blue of beginning.