📖 Behind the Story
A Promise was one of my first flash fiction stories. I wrote it in 2020, deployed overseas, trying to figure out who I was, what life meant, and what would come after.
Someone once told me that everything starts as a fantasy before it becomes a dream you can reach for. And I was fantasizing—about coming home to the one person my heart ached for. The person who lived rent-free in my mind while I was half a world away.
Maybe it was a way to cope with reality. Or maybe I was just exploring what I was missing. That specific brand of intimacy you crave when you’re alone in the dark—the desire to say “I am never leaving again” and mean it with your whole chest.
There’s a kitchen. Morning light. A military duffle that says everything about absence. And two people remembering how to touch without trembling.
Some promises aren’t about certainty. They’re about what you need to say when holding someone feels like the only truth that matters.
🎨 Visual Process
I kept coming back to silhouettes. How do you show intimacy without voyeurism? How do you make someone feel held rather than just see bodies?
The opening panels establish domesticity first: the kitchen, the sink, ordinary bowls on the counter. Then the military duffle with its nametag. That single object carries all the weight—duty, distance, what gets sacrificed.
We experimented with framing throughout.
Sometimes like film, sometimes like traditional comics. The second image uses classic comic paneling to slow down the moment. To let you sit in “I am glad you are home” before anything else happens.
The sixth image shifts into cinematic framing—wider and more intimate at once.
The challenge was the progression itself.
We don’t see their faces right away. Just actions. Just bodies in conversation.
He’s leaning against the kitchen island, undoing her shoulder straps from the front. His fingers trace her curves, making their way to her center, to her waist.
Finding reference images for this specific kind of intimacy was nearly impossible. I needed tenderness, not performance. I needed someone kissing her neck while the world narrows to just that point of contact.
Then the cosmic hand.
This was the most important visual choice—a subtle way to show where he’s touching without being explicit.
The hand becomes the universe: stars, light, infinite space held between his fingers and her skin. It bleeds into the intensity of the moment. Depending on how many subframes you use, it can extend into the fifth image, too.
The galaxy isn’t decoration. It’s the feeling—how touch can obliterate everything else until there’s nothing but sensation, nothing but this.
Color and texture.
I chose muted tones for the kitchen scenes—soft beiges, warm grays, deep blacks. Early morning light.
But when we hit the cosmic panel, the palette explodes into darkness punctuated by light. The texture throughout feels like memory, slightly grainy, like something you’re trying to hold onto even as it slips.
The composition narrows.
From wide establishing shots to increasingly intimate frames. It mirrors how you narrow your world when you’re finally holding the person you’ve been without.
By panel seven, their foreheads touch. Eyes closed. The line work is clean and deliberate—no blur, just clarity. Two people finding each other in the simplest gesture. Hearts fragile and vulnerable, filling the space between them.
The final image is pure text on black.
“I am never leaving again.”
Words spoken in darkness carry different weight than promises made in daylight. I wanted that line to sit in the void, unanchored, the way it sits in your chest when you say it.
What I struggled with most was balancing sensuality with tenderness.
The sexual aspect is there—it’s honest, it’s real—but I didn’t want voyeurism. I wanted ache.
The line art style helped: clean, simple, almost minimalist. The silhouettes do the work. They let you project your own longing onto these two people rather than watching them like a spectator.
💭 A Question for You
Have you ever made a promise you weren’t sure you could keep—but needed to say it in that moment anyway?
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