The Aerodynamics of Letting Go Part 1 by Goh Ling Yong
The Aerodynamics of Letting Go Part 1 by Goh Ling Yong
Navigating the turbulence of memory and finding the lift in release.
The scent of camphor and time-brittled paper hit me first. It was the smell of my grandfather’s study, a scent I thought had vanished from the world along with him. But here it was, released from a simple teakwood box that had sat, silent and heavy, in the corner of my storeroom for a decade. My mother had given it to me after the funeral, her hands trembling slightly. “Ah Pa wanted you to have this,” she’d said, her voice a thin thread. “When you’re ready.”
For ten years, I wasn’t ready. The box was a sealed universe of a man I wasn’t prepared to revisit. It was easier to keep him as a fixed constellation in my memory, distant and perfect, than to sift through the terrestrial dust he’d left behind. Grief is a stubborn architect; it builds walls around our hearts to protect the hollow spaces, and that box was a cornerstone I dared not touch.
But readiness isn’t an arrival. It’s a quiet shift in the atmosphere, the way the air changes before a storm breaks. For me, it came on a Tuesday afternoon, a day of unremarkable light and stillness, when the weight of carrying the unopened past finally became heavier than the fear of what was inside.
My hands, now the hands of a man in his thirties, fumbled with the tarnished brass latch. It gave way with a soft click, a sound that echoed like a key turning in a long-abandoned lock. Inside, nestled in yellowed silk, lay the artifacts of a life fully lived. His ridiculously thick spectacles, one arm mended with careful windings of black thread. A silver fountain pen, its nib still faintly stained with ink. A photograph, curled at the edges, of my grandmother as a young woman, her smile so radiant it seemed to generate its own light.
I traced the outlines of these objects, each one a portal. I could feel the rough texture of his tweed jacket, hear the low rumble of his laugh, see the way his eyes would crinkle at the corners when he was about to share a secret. These weren’t just things; they were anchors, mooring me to a harbour I had long since departed. And I felt the familiar weight settle in my chest, the comfortable, suffocating blanket of sorrow.
Then I saw it. Tucked beneath a well-worn copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, there was a paper airplane.
It wasn’t like the ones we used to make. Our childhood creations were clumsy things, folded from exercise book pages, destined for brief, wobbly flights across the living room. This one was different. It was elegant, precise, with sharp, deliberate creases. It was made not from a blank sheet, but from a piece of thin, almost translucent airmail paper covered in a graceful, looping script. It was a letter.
My grandfather, a retired aeronautical engineer, had always been obsessed with the principles of flight. He saw them everywhere. “Everything that moves through air or water is a study in resistance and release,” he would tell me, his voice full of a quiet passion. He taught me how a bird’s wing creates lift by creating a pressure differential, how a ship’s hull is designed to cut through drag.
And he taught me how to make paper airplanes. Not the simple darts, but complex gliders that could ride the currents of the air.
“Listen, Goh Ling Yong,” he would say, his large, warm hand guiding my small, clumsy ones as we folded a sheet of paper. “People think flight is about power, about thrust. But so much of it is about design. It’s about being light enough. It’s about shape. And most importantly, it’s about letting go at the exact right moment.”
He would hold the finished plane up to the light. “This paper,” he’d explain, “it wants to be just paper. It is weighed down by its own nature. But we give it a new shape, a new purpose. We fold its past into a new form. But it will never fly if you keep it clenched in your fist. The final, most important ingredient is the release.”
Holding his paper airplane now, made from what I could only assume was a letter from my grandmother, I understood. I could make out fragments of her writing through the folds. My dearest Wei… the monsoons have arrived… miss the sound of your laughter… This wasn’t just paper. It was a vessel of their love story, a moment of their history folded into a shape designed for flight.
For ten years, I had kept my grief clenched in my fist. I had held onto the memories, the pain, the love, so tightly that they became a single, dense mass in my soul. I thought that by holding on, I was honouring him. I was preserving the integrity of my love for him. But I wasn’t preserving it. I was grounding it. I had forgotten the final, most important ingredient.
The turbulence of memory is a powerful force. It can feel like being caught in a storm, buffeted by winds of what-if and if-only. You grip the controls, trying to keep the nose up, trying to fly straight, but the past is a relentless crosswind, pushing you off course. I had been flying in that storm for a decade, my knuckles white, my energy spent on simply not crashing.
I looked at the airplane in my hand. Its wings were promises. Its body was a story. Its nose pointed towards a future I had been too afraid to face. My grandfather hadn't left me a box of dead things, of static memories to be worshiped in the dark. He had left me a lesson. He had left me a key, folded into the shape of a wing.
With a sudden clarity that felt like a ray of sun breaking through storm clouds, I knew what I had to do. The box contained the past, but this single object contained the way forward.
I took the stairs to the roof of my apartment building, two at a time. The city sprawled below, a tapestry of light and life humming with its own relentless energy. The wind was gentle but steady, a river of air flowing over the concrete landscape. It was the perfect current.
I stood at the edge, the paper airplane resting on my open palm. It was so light, yet it felt like the heaviest thing I had ever held. It contained the weight of my grandfather’s life, my grandmother’s love, my own unresolved grief. Every instinct screamed at me to pull it back, to put it safely back in the box, to keep it forever. To keep him forever.
The drag of yesterday is strong, I could almost hear him whisper on the wind. It will try to pull you back. But lift is a beautiful, patient thing. It’s waiting for you.
My fingers trembled. This felt like a betrayal, like casting a sacred relic to the wind. But then I looked past the fear, and I saw the truth in his lesson. Letting go wasn’t an act of forgetting. It was an act of faith. It was a transformation of energy. It was converting the weight of memory, the anchor that held me down, into the very force that would grant it—and me—lift.
I took a deep breath, the cool evening air filling my lungs. I thought of my grandfather’s crinkled eyes, his warm hands, his quiet wisdom. And with a gentle push, a final, deliberate act of surrender, I released the plane.
For a terrifying second, it dipped, plunging towards the street below. My heart seized. I had made a mistake. I had destroyed it.
But then, just as he had taught me, it found the current. A small updraft caught its wing, and it corrected itself. It swooped, then climbed, its paper body suddenly alive, dancing with an invisible partner. It circled once, a graceful, silent salute, before soaring higher, catching the golden light of the setting sun.
I watched until it was just a tiny white speck against the vast, darkening sky. I watched until it was gone.
And I did not feel empty. I felt… light. The heavy anchor in my chest was gone, but the harbour wasn't empty. It was filled with a quiet, expansive peace. He was not in the box anymore. He was in the wind. He was in the principles of flight. He was in the courage it took to let something beautiful go, not to lose it, but to set it free.
This, I realized, was the aerodynamics of letting go. It is not about severing ties with the past. It’s about reshaping our relationship with it, folding the sorrow into a form that can fly, and then having the courage to open your hand and trust the wind. The journey was far from over, but for the first time in a long time, I felt the unmistakable sensation of lift.
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