The Aerodynamics of Letting Go Part 2 by Goh Ling Yong
The Aerodynamics of Letting Go Part 2
Navigating the Initial Turbulence
The silence in the apartment had a weight to it now, a physical presence that settled in the empty spaces. It was most noticeable in the mornings. For seven years, the first sound of the day had been the soft clink of two ceramic mugs being placed on the kitchen counter. Now, there was only one. My hand, moving on muscle memory, would reach for the second mug in the cupboard before freezing, suspended in the quiet air. It was a small, daily haunting. A reminder that the architecture of my life had been fundamentally altered, and I was still living in the ghost of its previous design.
This, I learned, is the initial turbulence. It’s not the dramatic, explosive breakup—that’s just the moment the engines fail. The turbulence is the violent, disorienting tumble that follows, when the sky and the ground switch places and your stomach tries to climb out of your throat. You are no longer flying; you are simply falling.
In the first week, I tried to maintain control. I followed routines with a fierce, brittle determination. I made my bed. I answered my emails. I went for long, punishing runs where the burn in my lungs felt like a fair trade for the ache in my chest. I thought that if I could just grip the yoke tightly enough, I could steer myself through the storm.
But grief is not a storm to be outmaneuvered. It’s a change in the very atmosphere you exist in. Every memory became a sudden pocket of low pressure, a crosswind that sent me spiralling. The worn patch on the left side of the sofa where he used to sit. The faint, spiced scent of his cologne clinging stubbornly to a sweater I couldn’t yet bring myself to pack away. A song on the radio that was our song, now an anthem for a country that no longer existed.
I was trying to fly a plane that had lost a wing, convinced that sheer willpower could keep it level.
I’ve always believed that our stories are what give us shape. As a writer, I build worlds out of words, characters out of flaws and desires. A manuscript lay on my desk, a half-finished story about resilience, of all things. The title page read, by Goh Ling Yong, and I would stare at my own name as if it belonged to a stranger. That person, the one who could orchestrator narratives of strength and recovery, felt like a fiction. The real me was a mess of frayed nerve endings, replaying every conversation, dissecting every silence, searching for the precise moment the hairline fracture began.
A friend, meaning well, told me, “You just have to let it go.”
It’s a phrase we use so lightly, as if letting go is an act of simple release, like unclenching a fist. But it’s not. In those early days, letting go felt like amputation. It felt like agreeing to be less than I was. My identity had been woven so tightly with his that a part of my own narrative was now missing, a chapter torn out mid-sentence. Letting go felt like accepting the blank page, and I didn’t know how to write what came next.
My attempts at release were clumsy. I packed a box with his things: the dog-eared paperback on the nightstand, the ridiculous souvenir snow globe from a trip we took, the faded photograph of us on a windswept beach, smiling at a future that would never arrive. I taped the box shut with a sense of finality, but its presence in the corner of the room was louder than the silence. It wasn't an act of letting go; it was an act of containment, a futile attempt to quarantine the past. The box pulsed with memories, a low-level radiation I could feel from across the room.
The turbulence wasn't just sadness. It was a nauseating blend of everything at once. Anger that flared like a struck match. A profound, hollow loneliness that echoed in the single clink of my teacup. And, most confusingly, flashes of relief—a breath of freedom that was immediately followed by a tidal wave of guilt. My emotional instruments were spinning wildly, no north, no south, no up, no down. I was lost in the clouds.
The climax of this initial fall wasn't a dramatic confrontation or a tearful phone call. It happened on a Tuesday, in the mundane setting of my own kitchen.
I was trying to reach for a jar of peppercorns on the top shelf, a jar he could always reach without effort. I stretched, my fingers just brushing the cool glass. And then, it slipped.
The world seemed to slow down. I watched the glass jar tumble in a graceful, horrible arc, its dark contents suspended for a moment against the pale afternoon light. It hit the linoleum floor not with a thud, but with a sharp, explosive crack that sounded like the breaking of a bone.
Tiny black peppercorns scattered across the floor like shrapnel. They rolled under the fridge, into the grout between the tiles, into every crevice of the room. A universe of tiny, hard, inescapable reminders of my failure.
And in that moment, something inside me broke with it.
I didn't try to clean it up. I just slid down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the floor amidst the wreckage. And I finally stopped fighting. I stopped trying to hold the yoke steady. I stopped pretending I could navigate. I let go of the controls and just let myself fall.
The sobs came from a place I hadn't known existed, a raw, guttural sound of pure loss. It was for him. It was for the seven years. But it was also for me—for the person I had been, for the future I had so carefully constructed in my mind. I wept for my own foolishness in believing anything was permanent, for my arrogance in thinking I could control the unpredictable aerodynamics of a human heart.
Lying there on the cool floor, surrounded by the debris of something so small and ordinary, I felt the truth of it all. Resilience isn't about avoiding the fall. It’s about surviving it. The art of release isn't about pushing something away. It’s about surrendering to the empty space it leaves behind. It’s the moment you stop flailing against the wind and instead learn its currents.
I don’t know how long I lay there. But when I finally sat up, the afternoon light had softened, turning the dust motes dancing in the air to gold. The turbulence hadn't vanished. The storm was still there. But the violent, chaotic tumbling had ceased.
Slowly, I got to my knees. I found a dustpan and brush, and I began the methodical work of cleaning up. I swept up the glass, the tiny black spheres, the remnants of what was. It was a quiet, meditative act. A recognition that you can't erase the mess, but you can choose to clean it. You can choose to move forward.
The next morning, I woke up to the familiar silence. But this time, it felt different. It wasn’t a weight; it was just an absence of sound. An emptiness waiting to be filled.
I went to the kitchen, my hand automatically going to the cupboard. I paused. Then, deliberately, I took out one mug. I filled the kettle. As the water heated, I walked to the window and opened it wide, letting the crisp morning air flood the room. It smelled of damp earth and the promise of a new day.
Letting go is not forgetting. It is not erasure. It is an adjustment of trim, a recalibration of your own wings to fly solo. The initial turbulence is terrifying because it's the moment you realize you are utterly alone in the cockpit. But it’s also the moment you realize the controls are, and always have been, in your own hands. The journey ahead was still uncertain, the skies still held storms, but for the first time since the fall began, I felt the whisper of lift.
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