Goh Ling Yong : The Museum of My Almost-Identities - Goh Ling Yong
The groan was the first thing I noticed. Not a digital chime or a cheerful whir, but a low, mechanical complaint, like an old man being forced out of a comfortable chair. The Dell Inspiron 8600, circa 2004, was waking up. Its plastic chassis, the colour of aged bone, was warm to the touch, and the fan kicked in with a dusty sigh. For twenty years, it had slept in a sarcophagus of bubble wrap and cardboard, a time capsule I’d forgotten I’d even packed.
Booting up took seven and a half minutes. I timed it. In that span, I could have made coffee, answered a dozen emails, and scrolled through the curated highlights of a hundred other lives. Instead, I watched a Windows XP logo swim in a sea of black, a ghost from a past technological epoch. When the desktop finally bloomed into view — a pixelated photograph of a sunset I’d taken on a 2-megapixel camera — I felt a strange mix of revulsion and tenderness. It was like running into an old version of myself on the street, a version I’d spent years trying to outgrow.
I navigated the sluggish cursor to the ‘My Documents’ folder. Double-click. Another groan. And then, it opened. It wasn’t a folder. It was a museum, a dimly lit gallery of wings that were never built and paths that were never taken. This was the Museum of My Almost-Identities, and I was its sole, reluctant curator.
Gallery One: The Novelist
The first exhibit was in a folder plainly titled WRITING. Inside, a single, monumentally important-looking sub-folder: THE_NOVEL. I felt my cheeks flush before I even clicked on it. We all have that one, don’t we? The magnum opus we started at nineteen, convinced we were the second coming of Dostoevsky, only with more dragons or trench coats.
Mine was called Ashen Echo. The file list was a testament to youthful ambition and utter lack of process:
Ashen_Echo_prologue.docAshen_Echo_Chapter1_draft.docAshen_Echo_Chapter1_REVISED.docAshen_Echo_Chapter1_FINAL.docAshen_Echo_Chapter1_FINAL_final_USE_THIS_ONE.doc
I opened the last one. The prose was purple, a deep, royal shade of overwritten melodrama. The first sentence alone contained three adverbs, a semicolon, and a metaphor involving a "velvet shroud of twilight." The protagonist, a man named Kaelen, had a "past shrouded in sorrow" and a "gaze that could cut glass." He was, in essence, every brooding cliché I had ever absorbed from fantasy novels and Japanese video games, stapled together into one insufferable package.
I read for ten minutes, my modern-day self wincing at every turn of phrase. The dialogue was stilted, the world-building was a flimsy copy of a copy, and the plot was going absolutely nowhere. It was awful. But as I read, the cringe began to subside, replaced by a strange sort of empathy for the boy who wrote it.
He wasn’t just trying to write a book; he was trying to forge an identity. He wanted to be The Novelist. He pictured himself in a dusty study, surrounded by leather-bound books, a pipe in his mouth (though he’d never smoked), dispensing worldly wisdom. He yearned for the gravitas, the perceived intellectual weight of being someone who creates worlds with words. That identity failed not because he lacked imagination, but because he lacked the discipline to write past the fun parts. He wanted the prestige of the finished cathedral, but he didn't want to lay the ten thousand bricks. The last date modified stamp on the file was from November 2005. The cathedral’s foundation was barely laid before the architect wandered off.
Gallery Two: The Indie Musician
From the silent, contemplative world of the novelist, I navigated to the next gallery. A folder named BAND_STUFF. A click, and I was twenty-one again, hunched over a cheap microphone in my bedroom, convinced that three chords and a whole lot of feelings were the key to rock stardom.
The artifacts here were auditory. A collection of .wav files, recorded with a free program that sounded like it was designed to capture the audio of a distant lawnmower. The band was called "Static Bloom," a name we thought was profound and mysterious. In reality, it just sounded like a faulty appliance.
I put on my headphones and clicked on Fading_Signal_demo_v2.wav. A blast of distorted, fumbling guitar filled my ears, followed by my own voice — thin, reedy, and straining for a note it had no business attempting. The lyrics were a masterclass in earnest, unexamined angst.
The city sleeps in monochrome,
Another night I’m all alone,
Your silence is a dial tone…
I had to pause it. The sheer, naked sincerity was almost too much to bear. This wasn't Kaelen, the cool, mysterious hero. This was just… me. A lonely, slightly confused kid who felt things so intensely that he thought the only way to process them was to rhyme "alone" with "dial tone" and set it to a C-G-Am-F chord progression.
This identity, The Indie Musician, wasn’t about quiet contemplation. It was about being heard. It was about taking all the messy, chaotic feelings inside and blasting them through an amplifier, hoping someone, anyone, would hear an echo of their own mess in the noise. It was a desperate plea for connection, disguised as art.
This identity died a quieter death than the novelist's. There was no single moment of giving up. It just… faded out. We played one disastrous open mic night where the sound system squealed more than I sang. We realized that passion couldn’t fix a drummer who couldn’t keep time or a singer who couldn’t stay in key. We quietly stopped practicing. The amplifier was sold to pay for textbooks. Static Bloom returned to being just static.
Gallery Three: The Urban Explorer Photographer
Closing the music folder, I found another titled PHOTO_PROJECTS. The exhibit inside was visual, a collection of JPEGs from 2006. The project was called "The Beauty of Decay." In it, I tried on the identity of The Urban Explorer Photographer, a fearless artist who finds profundity in dereliction.
The photos were exactly what you’d expect. High-contrast, black-and-white shots of an abandoned textile mill on the edge of town. There was the requisite photo of a single, broken chair in an empty room. A close-up of peeling paint. A shot of sunlight streaming through a shattered window, illuminating dust motes that I’d probably tried to enhance in an early version of Photoshop.
Looking at them now, I see the artifice. I wasn’t documenting decay; I was curating it. I was trying so hard to impose a narrative of tragic beauty onto a place that was, for all intents and purposes, just a rotting building. I was copying a style I’d seen online, adopting the aesthetic of depth without possessing the actual insight.
The boy who took these pictures wanted to be seen as someone who saw the world differently. He wanted the mystique of the artist who walks the forgotten paths, who carries a camera like a key to a secret world. He wanted his perspective to be considered unique, valuable.
This identity didn't die; it was assimilated. I still love photography, but my subjects have changed. I no longer hunt for performative decay. I take pictures of my daughter laughing, of the specific way light hits the kitchen table in the morning, of my wife’s hand resting on a book. I stopped trying to find beauty and started learning to notice it when it was already there. This gallery wasn't a failure; it was a clumsy apprenticeship.
The Curator’s Note
I spent two hours in the museum that afternoon, moving from one ghostly version of myself to the next. I found the half-finished screenplay for a painfully derivative sci-fi film. I unearthed the business plan for a web design company that was doomed from the start. I even found a folder of earnest, terribly formatted poetry.
Each folder I opened was a fresh wave of embarrassment, followed by a slow, rising tide of understanding. My first instinct was to drag it all to the recycle bin. To delete the evidence. To pretend these people, these clumsy, ambitious, misguided boys, never existed. Who wouldn't want to curate their own history, keeping only the flattering portraits and burying the awkward sketches?
But I couldn't do it.
Because they aren’t separate people. They are all me. The novelist who couldn’t finish a chapter taught me the value of structure and the hard reality of discipline. The musician who couldn’t hit the high notes taught me that vulnerability is the bedrock of connection. The photographer who chased clichés taught me the difference between looking and truly seeing.
These weren't failed identities. They were experiments. They were costumes I tried on to see how they fit, only to find the shoulders too broad or the sleeves too short. And in the discarding, I learned something about my own shape. We think of our lives as a single, linear path, but looking at this old hard drive, I see that it’s more like a sprawling delta. A hundred tiny streams of possibility branched off, and most of them ran dry. But they all flowed from the same source, and they all, in their own way, carved the landscape of the person I am today.
I am not a novelist, or a rock star, or a famous photographer. But I am a person who tries to tell true stories, who isn’t afraid of a little noise, and who pays attention to the light. The sum of these ghosts is a living man.
I moved the cursor to the top right of the screen. I didn’t delete anything. I just closed the folder, shut down the computer, and listened as the old machine groaned one last time before falling silent. The museum was closed for the day, its exhibits safe, its curator finally at peace with his collection.
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