🕯️ Author’s Note: The Quiet Bravery of Being Chosen
There’s a moment in Comings and Goings—just after the party, just before the kiss—where Jim steps into Kelly’s apartment and into something quieter, more deliberate. It’s not just a change of setting. It’s a shift in emotional gravity.
When she opened the door, I stepped into a space that felt like her: warm, a little cluttered, nothing performative. A couch with mismatched pillows. A lamp with a crooked shade. A milk crate bookshelf that had everything from The Bell Jar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead crammed in beside cassette tapes and Playbills. Theater posters curled slightly at the corners. A sprig of dried lavender rested in a glass next to the stereo.
“I’ve got something better than Bud,” Kelly called from the kitchen. “Hang on.”
She returned holding two green bottles.
Heineken.
Something in me flinched—not badly, just a flicker. Another night. Another time. My bedroom. A bottle handed to me like a rite of passage. Mark’s grin. My first sip, sharp and strange. The truth I’d spilled after. The kisses from Marty I hadn’t known what to do with. The tears that came anyway. “Maybe next year,” Mark had said, “you’ll be sharing a beer with a girl…”
I hadn’t expected to prove him right so soon.
Alex Diaz-Granados
Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen
Kelly doesn’t seduce. She initiates. She creates a space where vulnerability isn’t punished, and where intimacy isn’t a performance but a gesture of trust. Her invitation to listen to An Innocent Man, her choice of “This Night,” her soft “Can I?”—each moment is emotionally fluent, intentional, and generous.
When she undresses, it’s not spectacle. It’s a sanctuary. She’s not asking Jim to prove himself. She’s offering presence. And when Jim doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, but doesn’t look away—that’s his answer. That’s his reverence.
I didn’t write this scene to be provocative. I wrote it to be honest. To give a female character the agency to choose intimacy not as a reward or reaction, but as emotional sovereignty. Kelly needed something. She chose to share it. And Jim, in his quiet way, chose to receive it.
That’s the Garratyverse: where intimacy is mutual courage, and where being chosen as you truly are is the most radical truth of all.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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