Goh Ling Yong : The Unclaimed Property Office of My Last Relationship

Goh Ling Yong: The Unclaimed Property Office of My Last Relationship

On the archaeology of a shared life, and the quiet labor of curating someone else’s ghosts.

It starts with a book. A dog-eared paperback of Dune, left on the nightstand, its spine creased at the exact page where the Fremen first appear. For a week after he leaves, I don’t touch it. It sits there like a tiny, silent monument to an unfinished conversation. The room is clean, the bed is made, but the book is a stubborn piece of evidence that this space was, until very recently, co-habited. It’s the first artifact.

I am, I realize, the curator of the Unclaimed Property Office of My Last Relationship. There was no formal handover, no paperwork to sign. One day I was a partner, and the next, I was a reluctant archivist, responsible for the ephemera of a life that had detached from my own but left its physical sediment scattered throughout my apartment.

This is a quiet, unpaid, and deeply strange job. The first few days are a period of careful avoidance. I navigate around the pair of worn-out running shoes by the door as if they were a sleeping animal I’m afraid to wake. I use the guest towel in the bathroom because reaching for the navy blue one—his navy blue one—feels like an act of transgression. The space is filled with these small, invisible tripwires, each one connected to a memory that detonates with unnerving precision. A half-finished bottle of hot sauce in the fridge. A charging cable, coiled by the sofa like a dormant snake. A single, gray sock unearthed from the depths of the laundry basket.

Each item poses a question with no easy answer. What is the statute of limitations on a toothbrush? At what point does a hoodie left on the back of a chair cease to be ‘his’ and become simply ‘a’ hoodie? These aren't just objects; they are placeholders for a person, tangible ghosts. And it is my job to decide their fate.

The Archaeological Dig

The first phase of the work is what I call The Surface Skim. It’s dealing with the obvious, the things that scream of his presence. That toothbrush, for instance. It sits in the ceramic holder next to mine, a cheerful, bright green thing. For a week, it’s a symbol of hope—a sign he might come back for it, for me. The next week, it’s an accusation, a tiny plastic monument to my own foolish optimism. On a Tuesday morning, with a grim sense of ceremony, I drop it into the bin. The sound it makes is small, insignificant, yet it feels seismic. One ghost, exorcised.

This emboldens me. I move to the closet. Here, the artifacts are more complex. A wrinkled linen shirt we bought on vacation in a town I can no longer name without a wince. It still smells faintly of him, a combination of clean laundry and something uniquely his, a scent I could once identify in a crowded room. I hold it to my face and breathe in, a masochistic little ritual, trying to capture the last traces before they evaporate forever.

I find a t-shirt from a concert we went to two years ago. It’s soft from a hundred washes, faded and thin. He hated the band, but loved the overpriced beer. I remember him standing with his arms crossed, feigning boredom, and then catching my eye and breaking into a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. The t-shirt isn't just cotton; it's the weight of that memory, the echo of that smile. Do I throw it out? To do so feels like throwing out the memory itself, like saying it didn’t matter. To keep it feels like hoarding pain.

So I create a system. A large cardboard box becomes the official repository for the Unclaimed Property Office. The box is for items of medium-level emotional significance. Things I cannot yet discard, but cannot bear to see. The linen shirt goes in. The concert t-shirt. A paperback of poems with a corner of one page folded down to mark a line he liked. Each item is a small surrender. I am not deleting the past, I tell myself. I am simply archiving it.

Digital Phantoms and Deeper Strata

The physical objects are one thing. The digital residue is another beast entirely. An archaeologist of a modern relationship must also be a digital forensics expert.

Our shared Spotify playlist, titled “Road Trip Jams,” shuffles on one afternoon and a song comes on that we’d belted out together, off-key and deliriously happy, on a drive up the coast. My throat closes up. I stare at the phone, at the album art, and feel a fresh wave of grief. How do you put a playlist in a cardboard box?

There’s the Netflix account, still logged in on my television, his profile picture a goofy cartoon avatar he chose. I find myself scrolling past it quickly, a reflexive flinch. For weeks, I watch things on my laptop just to avoid that tiny, pixelated face. Deleting his profile feels like a final, brutal eviction. It is the digital equivalent of changing the locks. One click, and a part of our shared history is gone, no trace left but a void where his name used to be.

Then there are the photos, the thousands of them backed up to the cloud. A sprawling, uncurated gallery of our life together. Us on a hike, squinting in the sun. Us making dinner, flour on his nose. A blurry photo of his sleeping face, taken in the early morning light. To look at them is to willingly walk into a house of mirrors, each one reflecting a version of a happiness that feels both intensely real and utterly fictional. To delete them seems like a betrayal of the person I was when I was happy. Who am I to erase her?

This is the hardest part of the job. The digital ghosts are weightless but they are everywhere. They haunt the algorithms, popping up as “memories” on my phone, served to me by a cold, unfeeling intelligence that doesn't understand the nuances of a human heart. The curator’s job extends into the ether, sweeping up the digital dust of a life that has been disassembled.

The Inventory and The Insight

Weeks turn into months. The box in the closet gets heavier. The apartment, slowly, begins to feel like my own again. The empty space on the nightstand is no longer an absence, but just a space. The navy blue towel is just a towel. I have learned to navigate the tripwires.

One Saturday, I decide it’s time. I pull the box from the closet and open it. It’s an act of controlled excavation. I am no longer the grieving partner, but the objective archivist. I take out each item and lay it on the floor.

The linen shirt. The concert tee. The book of poetry. A chipped mug from his favorite coffee shop. A wool beanie he was always losing.

Laying them all out, I don’t feel the sharp sting of pain I expected. Instead, I feel a strange sense of tenderness. These aren’t just his things. They are artifacts of our thing. They are the physical proof that it happened, that it was real. They are the evidence of love, and of its eventual, messy, complicated end.

I had thought my job was to manage his leftover property. But I see now that was never it. The quiet labor of sifting through these objects wasn't about him at all. It was about me. It was a slow, methodical process of touching every part of the story, of acknowledging its weight, and then consciously deciding what to keep. Not what physical things to keep, but which memories to carry forward.

The hoodie can be donated, but the memory of the campfire can stay. The book can be given away, but the feeling of sharing a quiet moment of reading together is mine to hold. The real archaeology was not of his life, but of my own heart. I was digging through the layers of myself, figuring out which parts were still sound, which were fractured, and which needed to be gently brushed off and put back on display.

I pack the items back into the box, but this time, it feels different. It is no longer an archive of pain, but a finished collection. I tape it shut and write his name on the side in black marker. Not with anger, not with sadness, but with the simple, declarative finality of a task completed. I will let him know it’s here, ready for him if he wants it. His claim on it is his own business. My work is done.

The Unclaimed Property Office is officially closed. The space he left behind is no longer a void. It is just a space—clean, quiet, and ready for whatever comes next. And it is, finally, all mine.

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Goh Ling Yong : The Unclaimed Property Office of My Last Relationship - Goh Ling Yong