The Friend Who Says "Yeah, Be Right There"

The motorbike dies on a dark stretch of road,
under a streetlight that keeps blinking.
I make one call.
Just one.

She does not ask "why at this hour."
Does not ask "what are you doing out there."
Only two words,
hoarse from being woken:
"Yeah, be right there."

Twelve minutes.
I count them in frog-song from the ditch,
in the smoke of someone burning straw far off,
in my own headlight, flickering on and off.

Then the familiar engine.
A beam sweeps across my face,
blinding for a second,
then softening.

No comfort offered.
Just a kickstand pressed down,
a pair of flip-flops, mismatched,
and: "Go on, give it a push."

Love, it turns out,
is sometimes just two words you can say at midnight,
and someone willing to leave the blanket behind,
no need to know why.

Yeah, be right there.

I wrote this after a night when my motorbike died on a stretch of road near the wholesale market. Past eleven, my phone at twenty percent, my sleeve smelling of engine oil. There were more than four hundred names in my contacts, and I stood there for nearly three minutes without tapping a single one.

The twelve minutes of waiting after that were the longest of my week. I sat on the saddle, tilted to one side because the kickstand had sunk into the soft ground, switched off every light to save the battery, then switched them back on because it was too dark. The frogs in the ditch seemed unnaturally loud. At one point I typed to Vy "forget it, I can manage" and deleted it, because I knew that if I sent it she would come anyway, and I would only feel worse about myself.

"Why didn't you call sooner?" Vy asked, when we had pushed the bike halfway home.

"I thought I could push it by myself."

"For three kilometres?"

"I thought it was closer."

Those three minutes, I was not hesitating because I feared being a bother. I was hesitating because calling meant saying a sentence I rarely say: I need you. Vy, I guess, did not hear that sentence as a burden. She heard it as a vote of trust. One phone call, understood in two different ways, and it took me three minutes to find that out.

The poem does not say anything grand about friendship. It only keeps one sentence and a pair of mismatched flip-flops. If you would like to become the person who says "yeah, be right there" for someone and you are not sure where to begin, five ways to check in on someone who is burned out is a place to borrow words. And after that, you might want a few thank-you habits to be kind to each other with.

Maybe you finished reading and still could not think of a single name to call at midnight. That says nothing bad about you. There are stretches when a contact list is full and nobody is in it. If that feeling lasts several weeks, telling a professional is one kind thing you can do for yourself.