If I had remembered to bring my umbrella that day, maybe I never would've met her.
Or maybe I still would've, just under different skies.
It was October, and Taipei was caught in one of those long, indecisive rains—the kind that doesn't pour but never quite stops either. I stood outside the library building, watching the rain curtain fall in slow motion, wondering if running through it would ruin my laptop.
That's when she appeared.
She walked out from behind me like she already knew where I was going, carrying a pale blue umbrella and a tote bag covered in quote stickers—Vonnegut, Salinger, Sylvia Plath. She stopped beside me, glanced up at the clouds, and said casually:
> "You look like someone who hates asking for help."
I blinked.
She smiled, not waiting for permission, and tilted her umbrella slightly toward me.
> "Walk with me. I'm heading the same way."
I hesitated for exactly one second. Then I stepped in.
---
Her name was Lina Wu.
I learned that five minutes later, as we passed the coffee shop near the student center.
> "What's your name?" she asked, like she was asking for the time.
> "Eli," I said.
> "Figures," she said, cryptically, and sipped her matcha latte like it explained something.
She spoke like someone who always knew the next thing to say. Like someone who didn't mind the silence between words. I liked that. I liked the quiet.
I didn't realize until much later that I liked her.
---
We parted ways at the steps of the journalism building.
> "Thanks for sharing," I said, nodding toward the umbrella.
She looked at me like she was deciding something.
Then she handed it to me.
> "Keep it," she said. "But don't fall in love with me just because I gave you an umbrella."
She didn't say it flirtatiously. She said it like a joke wrapped around a warning.
Then she turned and walked into the rain, her sleeves damp and hair clinging to her neck.
I stood there holding her umbrella like an idiot, watching her go.
---
I saw her again a week later in the library.
She was sitting by the window, reading The Bell Jar, writing notes in the margins with a fine black pen. She looked up when I passed.
> "Still have my umbrella?" she asked, as if no time had passed.
> "Still dry, thanks to you."
> "Then we're even."
> "What if I want to owe you something?" I said. I don't know where that came from.
She looked at me for a moment, long enough for me to notice the faint purplish tint under her eyes, the delicate way she breathed, like she was always saving strength.
> "Careful," she said. "I'm a debt you can't repay."
---
That was how it started.
A borrowed umbrella. A quiet library table. A thousand unwritten things.
And me, sitting there across from her, already falling—
not into love,
but into something softer, deeper, slower.
Something that would, years later, still ache whenever it rained.