One-Shot Story
The rain had been falling all afternoon soft, persistent, like a memory that refused to fade.
Eli stood at the old bus stop, the one near the corner café that still smelled faintly of roasted beans and rain-soaked wood. His umbrella leaned beside him, ribs bent and cloth torn, a casualty of the wind.
He sighed, watching raindrops race down the glass shelter. Another gray day. Another quiet hour in a city that had learned to forget him.
And then
"Do you want to share?"
Her voice. Warm, uncertain, and far too kind for the cold world around them.
He turned. There she was a stranger in a yellow raincoat, her umbrella tilted slightly toward him. The color was too bright for such a dull day, but maybe that was the point.
Eli blinked. "You don't even know me."
She smiled, eyes crinkling. "You look like you need saving."
And under that small circle of shelter, the rain didn't feel so heavy anymore.
Rain Became Their Season
Her name was Mira an art student who carried sketchbooks filled with strangers' faces and dreams she wasn't brave enough to say aloud.
They met again the next week. And the next.At first by coincidence. Then by choice.
Rainy days became their ritual one umbrella, two hearts learning the rhythm of falling water.They'd walk home slowly, stop for coffee, talk about everything and nothing.
"Do you ever wonder," she said once, "if rain remembers us?"
Eli laughed. "Why would it?"
"Because," she said, tilting her head toward the sky, "it always falls where we first met."
The Drift
But life, as always, had other plans.
Mira earned a scholarship abroad. Eli landed an internship in the city.They promised to visit, to call, to write.
And they did. For a while.
Until distance stretched between them like unspoken words.One missed message became two. One unanswered call turned into silence.
When it rained, Eli would still glance out his window, half-expecting to see a yellow umbrella waiting.But the streets stayed empty.
Time moved on, quietly cruel.
Five Years Later
The city had changed new buildings, new people, same endless rain.
Eli returned home with a suitcase full of work papers and an emptiness he couldn't name.He passed the same bus stop, now cracked and rusted, and stopped.
Their initials E + M were still faintly carved into the bench.He smiled, a sad, crooked thing.
It began to rain again. Of course it did.
He raised his umbrella a sturdy, black one this time. Reliable. Unromantic.But then, through the veil of falling water, he saw it
A splash of yellow.
The Return
She stood across the street, holding the same bright umbrella. Her hair shorter now, her face calmer, wiser but those eyes, those eyes hadn't changed.
Mira.
For a second, the years folded in on themselves.
She crossed the street slowly, rain glimmering in her hair."You still don't have your own umbrella?" she teased, voice trembling between laughter and tears.
He laughed softly. "Maybe I was waiting for yours."
Her lips parted, and she looked up at him the same way she used to look up at the rain.And without another word, she lifted her yellow umbrella, letting him step under its too-small shelter once again.
The world blurred around them people rushing past, cars hissing through puddles but inside that little circle of color and warmth, time stood still.
When the Rain Remembered Us
Later that night, as the rain softened into mist, Eli realized something.The rain hadn't just remembered them.
It had been waiting.
Waiting for them to find each other again two souls who once got lost, now finally home beneath the same storm.
And for the first time in five years, Eli didn't mind getting wet.
Because this time, he wasn't alone.
— End —