Blue Umbrellas

It isn't the first time I've been under a blue umbrella. There was that time long ago I had bought one at the beach because the sun was unforgiving and the rain occasionally would pass as it does in Florida. 2018, was it? It is amazing all that can get lost in just seven years—the way things get lost in the cushions of a comfortable couch. Time is unforgiving.

We lied there on the beach and drank and made love with our hands under the canopy of that umbrella. I wrote something, or read something, as she relaxed, her eyes squinting, smiling. Occasionally, we went out into the water to cool ourselves. She told me it was okay to pee in the ocean because there was so much of it and there was no bathroom on the beach. 

We bobbed up and down in the water and took pictures, never going so far out that we risked encountering a shark. I told bad jokes and we laughed at the prospect of drowning and for the fact that dolphins are the only species besides humans that have sex for pleasure. Dolphin sex was a joke we shared. She wanted to have sex in the ocean, but it was early afternoon and there were people not so far away.

They won't know, she insisted. I laughed. Waves occasionally lapped us and the sand shifted beneath our feet. She wanted me to pearl her oyster.

There were cargo ships in the distance waiting to port. I imagined something more sinister—an impending invasion. I pretended I was a Cuban secret agent and she was a Russian spy, but I can't recall what we named her. It, too, is lost in those years—in that couch of life. I thought that was it for me. That she were it for me. That was where I was meant to be. With who I was meant to be with. But I was wrong. I wasn't meant to be under that blue umbrella I know now as I sit under this one. And maybe, in time, I will realize I am not meant to be under this one, either—that I have yet to find the right umbrella. Maybe it is not blue at all. 

I was lying on the beach reading as she was out in the water. Maybe she was peeing or having sex with a dolphin or just watching those still cargo ships that were ruining everyone's photographs. A man walked by and crouched down next to me. I knew who he was, though we had never met. He was me in the future. Seven years wiser. I was not at all shocked by him as I looked up covering my squinting eyes with my hand. He didn't crouch beneath the umbrella with me, rather, he stood in the sun as though he were impervious to the heat and the brightness. How soon I forgot how hot that sand was, but he stood there on bare feet. 

She is beautiful, isn't she?

Yes, I replied. She is. 

His voice was mine. But the sound of one's voice is always strange when heard spoken to or played back rather than when heard spoken from one's self.

You ought to leave her. She is no good for you. Nothing good will ever come of her or this, mark my words. 

And then, as abruptly as he came, he left. I lied there half asleep wondering if I had dreamt myself into existence. Was I conjured up from heat and alcohol and dehydration? I got up to look for him, but he was gone. So the reality of him, or me, was instantly relegated to merely a dream. Maybe he was my conscience. He was my Jiminy Cricket doling out good advice I wouldn't heed. 

As dumb as Pinnochio, I got up and ran out to the water. The hot sand burning my feet until I got to the foam-capped waves that softly lapped the beach. I dismissed the stranger and his advice and we made love in the hotel rather than in the ocean, that blue umbrella folded up neatly on the nightstand. Teaspoons of sand sprinkled all over the hotel carpet.

I couldn't imagine at the time that there would be other blue umbrellas for me. But here I am now, staring up at this one over a table downtown with another beautiful woman in my lap. I wonder if I might again be visited by a future ghost of myself. I wonder if I would heed his advice. But as of yet, he has not come. 

My advice to myself that day seven years past, was sound. But had I taken it, had I left her then and took an immediate flight home and burned our memories, I would have thought of her as something more valuable lost and faulted myself. Less pain and misery, sure, but afforded something she did not deserve—reverence—and perhaps blue umbrellas would then have made me miss her, which I do not. I've learned to appreciate the good memories of everyone, but not to revel in them. Not to get lost in the cushions, or in the dulled forgiveness of years. 

Love has always been a butterfly to me. That which ought not ever know a net, and for which I plant many flowers. Where it goes I cannot dictate or mourn because I knew it once. Where it has been and where it is, I can only celebrate and enjoy it while it lasts like canopy of blue umbrellas.