The Night That Stayed With Me: The Genesis of 'Comings and Goings'

 

© 2025 Alex Diaz-Granados

Comings and Goings: The Art of Being Seen wasn’t something I planned to write.

It began, as many things do, with a memory—or the ghost of one. A fleeting moment tucked into Reunion: Coda, when Jim Garraty, now older and maybe wiser, walks across Columbia’s campus and thinks he sees her. Not a name, just a resemblance. Not certainty, just recognition. And for a second, 1984 floods back—along with a girl who poured him a Heineken and didn’t ask him to be anyone but who he was.

“She has the same blonde hair and bright, inquisitive blue eyes as Kelly Moore, a girl I met at a freshman party at Harvard... The faint taste of the beer lingers in my memory, crisp and slightly bitter.”

That was all it took. Kelly Moore—originally just a footnote in Jim’s emotional ledger—began to insist on more space. Her voice, her presence, the shape of that night refused to fade. Until finally, I stopped trying to treat it like a tangent.

And wrote it as a story.




The Night Itself

It was unmistakably 1984. Jordache jeans, pastel tees, and Billy Joel in the background. Jim—nineteen, uncertain, leaning into the wall at a party he had no business attending—wasn’t there for connection. He was just trying to breathe.

Until Kelly found him.

“You’re not having a good time, are you?”

From that moment on, Comings and Goings became about the quiet pivots—the emotional gravity of a single evening. The shift between guardedness and presence. The way music and memory form a kind of intimate scaffolding. The difference between touch as performance and touch as understanding. This was about someone stepping into your orbit not to change you, but to meet you exactly where you are.

Kelly’s apartment in Mission Hill wasn’t a stage—it was a sanctuary: warm, unpolished, personal. And when intimacy unfolded, it wasn’t spectacle. It was breath, stillness, kindness.

“Because I like you,” she said. “Because I needed to. And… because I think you needed this, too.”


A Shared Memory

At the end of Comings and Goings, I included something extra—something quieter. A final note not from Jim, but from Kelly. Because this night wasn’t just his. It belonged to her too. And letting her speak felt necessary.

Here’s a page from her memory:


The stereo had gone still just after midnight. I’d clicked it off—technically for the neighbors, but mostly because the music didn’t feel necessary anymore. The room didn’t need filling. It was already full—with breath, with pulse, with whatever unnamed thing had just passed between us...

“Then it was perfect,” I told him. “You were kind. You were here. That’s what matters.”


Why I Wrote It Anyway

I didn’t write Comings and Goings to explain Jim’s history. I wrote it because that night mattered—not just in a nostalgic sense, but in the way oxygen matters to lungs. Sometimes, the evenings we quietly carry forward shape us more than the ones that roar.

So, whether this is your introduction to Jim Garraty or a return visit—thank you. Thank you for making space for stories like this: the ones that whisper but stay.

 

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