I’m Outside

There’s a last room before the room, and it isn’t glamorous. It’s the curb. Hazards blinking on a Honda that’s been circling too long. Rain finding the gap between their collar and their neck while you are still upstairs, doing your mouth in a toaster-oven reflection and pretending five more minutes won’t matter.

Then the text lands. i’m outside. Time-stamped 11:47. Live location glowing like an accusation you will ignore because you are hunting for the other boot under the bed. They are not your driver. They drove across town, parked somewhere illegal-adjacent, and made themselves into the door policy so you wouldn’t have to stand in the weather alone. The least you can do is come down like you meant it.

In 1998 it was three missed calls and a Motorola dying on the SkyTrain, the little screen going black right when you needed their voice. In 2004 it was a horn you weren’t supposed to use in that neighbourhood, short and guilty, hoping the curtains wouldn’t twitch. In 2026 it’s a blue bubble and a pin on a map, and somehow we still treat the person holding the phone on the sidewalk like furniture. The rain here has never cared about your eyeliner. It only cares whether you move.

The ritual is stupidly simple and somehow we keep failing it: shoes, jacket, keys, down the stairs without drafting a paragraph about which song should open the aux. Do not send five mins unless it is actually five minutes. Do not make them loop the block while you change the track again. Do not leave them in the wet performing patience so you can perfect a look nobody will see in the dark anyway.

If you are the one on the curb, you already did the generous thing. You showed up. You waited. You texted once, maybe twice, and then you watched the blue ticks and tried not to get weird about it. That quiet little hurt, the one where you start calculating how long is too long, is part of the night too, even if nobody puts it on the flyer.

If you are the one upstairs, hear this without the soft focus: the night started without you the second their sneakers hit the pavement. Put the lip in your pocket. The aux can wait in the car. It always does. What can’t wait is a person who chose you enough to stand in Cascadia weather and send three words that still mean the same thing they meant when the phone was a brick.

I’m outside. Come down.