The egg shattered open and the bird awoke lying on its nest almost dead. Struggling for the sugar coated worms dangling from his colorful magpie mother’s beak, he was shoved in the commotion and fell six feet from the nest to the impact of the solid ground. The young man quickly got up to escape the Spartans invading Athens, his hometown where he spent many a day gliding 100 paintbrush strokes across a canvas. He had one more brushstroke left to run across his masterpiece when suddenly, the Spartan soldiers tore through his beautiful Athens and sliced the painting right across the middle, right through the face of the lady with the blue parasol. A homeless vagrant, he wandered through the urban mess of sidewalks and buildings that scraped the heavens. He peered into the windows of homes, glowing like compassion in the freezing night, looking for his new muse, a new inspiration, a new woman with a new blue parasol, the one to once again stoke the flames of his pulsing heart. But what he found instead was the same TV set telling of the same trite love stories, of the same vapid faces, and smiles, and eyes that twinkle and shine everlasting. At that moment, a man jumped from one of the homes’ window, followed by a trail of hurtling plates and angry yells. Off to the horizon of the rising sun he ran. He escaped from oppression, from the shackles of pretentious first love, so seemingly perfect, so seemingly everlasting, that locked him into his wedding and promised his happily ever after. The divorce papers withered in the mourning air and released the man and woman apart, so they could seek out the true love of their real lives. So off the vagrant walked, past the city, past the Alps, past the hundred heartfelt lonely nights looking for another blue-parasoled muse till he grew old and faded and a hundred different parasols lined after him, each hiding blushing maiden faces. Each parasol was a variant color, one was ebony, another red, ochre, there was magenta, and peach, one cerulean, there was one of every hue in the color spectrum but never could he again find the lovely blue parasol. Even after all the decades come and past, even after her face was lost and blurry like a Roman artifact in the waxing and waning of the tides of time, even after the shining constellations of moles on her bare back had grown dim, her magnificent blue parasol illuminated and lived in the depths of his aging mind where it stayed youthful and new; the feeling of the way it swayed in the wind, the sound of its smile, and the embrace of its fragrance. Forever lived his first true love. When he tired of life, he opened his bedroom window, spread out his wings and flew into heaven, passing along the way, the divorced man from the city peeking from the shadowed alleyways, watching longingly at the wife, that was once his, originally his, prepare dinner for her adoring grandchildren.
     I give you a story, a creative interpretation of first love and how it’s so lasting and always lives in ourselves forever, through the testaments of time, and courage, and a hundred repeating seemingly apathetic days.