“Some Loves Don’t Ask” (Inspired by ‘Comings and Goings: The Art of Being Seen’)

The Boy She Loved for One Night

She’s older now—
not by much,
but enough that the past
feels more like a country she left
than one she was exiled from.

At a shelf she wasn’t seeking,
his name appears—
spine out, serifed,
tucked between authors she almost recognizes.
Garraty.

A flicker.
A room.
A song dressed in Beethoven’s longing.
A voice that whispered “Can I?”
And hands that never rushed.

She doesn’t pull the book free.
Doesn’t need to.
The cover isn’t what stays.
It’s the silence they shared—
the kind that said stay,
without ever saying forever.

Some loves don’t ask to be remembered.
They just hope not to be misremembered.

She smiles—
not wistful.
Not aching.
Just full of the kind of grace
that comes from knowing
you were there,
and that was
enough.

---

The Girl Who Called It Perfect

He’s older now—
not in years so much as in understanding.
His name sits on book covers
in serifed fonts
he didn’t choose.
People quote him in fragments
but never the ones that mattered.

Once,
on a night filled with ABBA and stale beer,
he was handed a kindness
disguised as a kiss.
Not a promise.
Not a prelude.
Just presence.

He never saw her again.
But some mornings—quiet ones,
when the house still holds the hush of before-coffee hours—
he remembers her fingertips
and the way she said
You were kind. You were here. That’s what matters.

He doesn’t write it down.
He never does.
But it hums through everything
he’s learned how to leave unsaid.

---

A Quiet Refrain

Somewhere,
a woman named Kelly Moore
walks past a window
just as someone inside says his name.
She doesn’t stop.
But the memory flares like a match—
brief, bright, beautiful.

And somewhere else,
Jim Garraty runs his fingers
over a cracked cassette spine,
hears the opening bars of “This Night,”
and smiles like he’s hearing it
for the first time again.

They don’t speak.
They don’t meet.
But in the long hush between two lives,
they remember—

not the night,
but the truth of it.