COLUMBUS, Ohio — Local resident Derek Fulmuth, 31, transmitted the text message "on my way!" to a waiting party at 7:43 p.m. Tuesday, at which point he was seated on his couch, shoeless, with his apartment keys believed to be in a third location, sources confirmed.

Fulmuth, who had been invited to a dinner reservation with a 7:30 p.m. start time, reportedly composed and sent the message in a single fluid motion before setting his phone face-down on the cushion beside him and exhaling slowly through his nose.

At time of publication, no subsequent movement had been detected.

"The text functions less as a factual status update and more as a psychological transitional object — a way of conceptually departing before the body has agreed to participate."

"He was clearly in a pre-departure ideation phase," said Dr. Constance Mellwether, Associate Professor of Behavioral Semiotics and Digital Self-Deception at the Greater Columbus Institute for Applied Social Friction. "The text functions less as a factual status update and more as a psychological transitional object — a way of conceptually departing before the body has agreed to participate."

Witnesses in the adjacent kitchenette reported that Fulmuth's keys were not on the hook by the door, not on the counter, and not in either of his jacket pockets, as his jacket had also not been located. A secondary search of the couch cushions yielded a television remote and $1.17 in loose change, neither of which meaningfully advanced his departure.

Fulmuth is said to have spent approximately four minutes in a state of "deep logistical contemplation" before standing, sitting back down to check his phone, and then standing again. A second text message, "almost there lol," was composed shortly after 7:51 p.m. from within the same apartment.

Authorities have confirmed that the phrase "on my way" carries no legally binding implication of physical motion, a precedent established informally but consistently across millions of similar exchanges each year.

Dr. Mellwether noted that Fulmuth's behavior falls within what researchers have termed the "Schrödinger Commute," a temporal window in which an individual is simultaneously on their way and definitively not on their way, and that the state collapses only upon the location of the keys.

"The message is not a lie, precisely," Mellwether clarified. "It is an expression of sincere future intent delivered prematurely, with optimism serving as the primary unit of measurement."

The dinner party was informed at 8:04 p.m. that Fulmuth was "literally two minutes away." He arrived at 8:22 p.m., slightly out of breath, and immediately said he'd had trouble parking.