Goh Ling Yong : The Coordinates of the Person I Used to Be - Goh Ling Yong
The GPS dot pulsed over the satellite image of the woods, a tiny blue sun in a sea of green. It insisted I had arrived. I looked up from my phone, then at the tangled reality of fallen branches and grasping thorns that surrounded me. Ten years had changed the landscape in ways the digital map couldn't comprehend. The slender birch I’d used as a marker, the one with the scar shaped like a question mark, was gone. In its place stood a thicket of anonymous saplings, all vying for the same patch of light.
My boots sank into the damp mulch of a decade’s worth of fallen leaves. I was here. Or, at least, my phone was. The person I was looking for was another matter entirely.
The Burial
I can still feel the memory of that day in my teeth. It was a cold, bright Tuesday in October, the kind of day that feels like a lie. The sky was an impossible, cloudless blue while our world, the small, carefully curated world we had built in a two-bedroom apartment over a laundromat, was ending. We didn’t scream. We didn't throw things. The end came quietly, in the sterile space between sentences.
"I don't think I can do this anymore," he had said, and the words hung in the air, solid as furniture. I didn't disagree. The fight had gone out of us months ago, replaced by a polite, exhausting sadness.
While he packed his books and his favourite coffee mug, I found an old biscuit tin, the kind my grandmother used to keep, decorated with a faded painting of Scottish terriers. I started my own kind of packing. Not of things I wanted to keep, but of things I needed to lose. The ticket stub from our first concert—The National. A photograph from our honeymoon in Vietnam, where we are both laughing, squinting into a sun I could no longer remember feeling. The key to the post office box we’d shared. A single, perfect silver-grey stone I’d picked up from the beach on the day he proposed. And finally, on a torn piece of notebook paper, I wrote a letter not to him, but to the moment itself. I didn't write about anger or betrayal. I just wrote: I loved you. I was happy.
I sealed the tin with duct tape, wrapping it again and again until it was a clumsy, silver mummy. I drove to the state park, the tin heavy on the passenger seat. I walked into the woods without a plan, just a need for the earth to take something from me. I found the young birch with its questioning scar and dug a hole with a garden trowel I’d grabbed from the boot of my car. The ground was hard and full of roots. It felt like burying a small animal. When it was done, I stood up, brushed the dirt from my jeans, and took a screenshot of my location on my phone. A little digital anchor. Then I walked away and didn't look back. I deleted the photo from my phone a week later, but not before emailing the coordinates to a forgotten Hotmail account with the subject line: "In Case of Emergency." I was never sure what kind of emergency would qualify.
The Search
Ten years is an emergency of a different kind. It's the slow-motion crisis of becoming someone else without noticing. I’d come back not because I missed him, or because I wanted to reclaim some lost part of myself. I came back because I was about to get married again, to a kind, steady man who loved the person I was now. And it felt like a betrayal, a kind of lie, to not first go and sit with the ghost I had buried here. I needed to look that younger woman in the eye and tell her, "It's okay. You can rest now."
But the woods had other ideas. I circled the area the GPS insisted was correct, my frustration mounting. Every tree looked the same. The ground was an undifferentiated carpet of brown. Was it possible the tin had been found? Unearthed by an animal, or a park ranger, or a kid with a metal detector? The thought sent a strange pang through me—not of loss, but of violation. That grief was private.
I stopped and closed my eyes, trying to access a different kind of map. The sensory map of that day. I remembered the feeling of the sun on the back of my neck. I turned to face the direction the sun would have been in on a late October afternoon. I remembered the sound of a distant highway, a low, constant hum. I walked toward it. And then, a flicker of memory: a large, moss-covered boulder, shaped like a sleeping bear. I had rested against it before I started digging. I scanned the woods, my heart starting to pound. And there it was, twenty yards to my left, half-hidden by a curtain of ferns.
The sleeping bear.
Using the boulder as my new anchor, I paced out the steps I might have taken. I looked for a disturbance in the ground, a depression, anything. Nothing. I took the small spade I’d brought from my pack and started digging anyway, cutting neat squares of turf and placing them carefully to one side. The earth was soft and loamy. I dug for twenty minutes, my breath misting in the cool air, sweat trickling down my back. My spade hit a root. Then another. Then, with a dull, metallic thunk that vibrated up the handle and into my bones, it hit something else.
The Discovery
My breath caught. I knelt, scraping away the last of the soil with my bare hands, the cold mud pressing under my fingernails. The silver of the duct tape was tarnished, almost black in places, but it was there. The biscuit tin. It was smaller than I remembered, and felt impossibly light.
I lifted it from its grave. It was damp and cold, smelling of rust and deep earth. For a long moment, I just held it, this strange artifact from a forgotten civilization—my own. The person who buried this felt like a character in a book I’d once read. Her pain was theoretical, her choices foreign. Had I really been so dramatic? So lost?
I sat on the mossy boulder and began to peel away the layers of duct tape. They came away with a sticky, tearing sound, revealing the faded Scottish terriers underneath. The lid was rusted shut. I had to pry it open with the edge of my spade, the screech of metal on metal making me wince.
The contents were preserved, but changed. The photo was water-damaged, the edges bleeding into a brown stain, our laughing faces distorted into a ghostly smear. The concert ticket was a fragile, tissue-thin rectangle, the ink barely legible. The stone was just a stone, cold and grey, its sentimental power long since leached away by the earth. It was all just… stuff. Debris from a shipwreck.
And then I saw the note, folded into a tiny square. My fingers, clumsy with cold and anticipation, unfolded it. The paper was stiff and yellowed. The ink, a simple blue ballpoint, had held.
I loved you. I was happy.
I had expected to feel a rush of sadness, a wave of nostalgia for the girl who wrote those words, for the love she thought was her whole world. But I felt something else entirely. A profound, quiet tenderness. Not for him. Not even for the relationship. But for her. For the 28-year-old woman who, in the middle of her world falling apart, had the presence of mind to perform this strange, hopeful ritual. She wasn't burying her love to kill it. She was burying it to protect it, to mark it as real. She was planting a seed of evidence that she had been happy once, which meant she could be happy again. She was creating a coordinate point, a fixed location in time and space that said, I was here. This happened. It mattered.
I hadn't come back to dig up a ghost. I’d come back to meet a cartographer. The cartographer of my own heart, who had left me a map.
I put everything back in the tin, except for the little grey stone. I closed the lid, leaving it unsealed this time. I didn't re-bury it. I placed it at the foot of the sleeping bear boulder, a small, humble offering to the woods, to time, to the person I used to be. Let the rain have it. Let the animals knock it over. Its purpose was served.
Walking back to the car, the little stone felt smooth and cool in my pocket. It wasn't a reminder of a failed marriage. It was a waypoint. A reminder that you can leave a part of yourself behind in the woods, marked by a set of coordinates, and still find your way home. In fact, sometimes it’s the only way you can.
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