The Cartography of Scars Part 1
Of course. Here is the complete narrative story, written in the persona of Goh Ling Yong.
The Cartography of Scars Part 1
Finding my way back by tracing the lines of what broke me.
By Goh Ling Yong
There is a scar on my left knee, a pale, silvery crescent moon etched into the skin. It’s been there for thirty years. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the phantom sting of gravel, the humid weight of the air just after a storm, the metallic tang of blood mixing with rain. I was seven, riding my brother’s too-big bicycle, convinced I could fly. For a glorious three seconds, I did. Then gravity, as it always does, reminded me of my place in the world.
For years, that scar was just a story I’d tell at parties—a simple, clean narrative with a beginning (hubris), a middle (the fall), and an end (a bandage and a bowl of my grandmother’s bird’s nest soup). A tidy little map of a minor disaster. It had clear borders, a known topography. It was a scar I understood.
It was the other ones, the ones you can’t see, that left me truly lost.
The Great Shattering, as I’ve come to call it, didn’t happen with the screech of tires or a doctor’s somber pronouncement. It happened in silence. It was the silence of a key turning in a lock for the last time, the silence of a coffee mug left unwashed in the sink, the silence of a space in the bed that suddenly felt cavernous, impossibly cold. It was the quiet erasure of a future I had mapped out in intricate detail.
In the months that followed, I became a ghost in my own life. The world, once vibrant and saturated, turned a hazy, uniform grey. Food was fuel, but it tasted of ash. Music was a collection of frequencies, noise that failed to penetrate the thick fog that had settled around my heart. Friends would call, their voices full of well-meaning advice. “You just need to get out there,” they’d say. “Time heals all wounds.”
But time wasn’t a healer. It was a vast, empty expanse, an uncharted territory of grief with no landmarks to guide me. My internal compass was spinning wildly, its needle unable to find a true north. I was adrift in the wreckage of what used to be my life, and every attempt to navigate felt futile. The maps I had always relied on—ambition, love, connection—were now just faded lines on soaked, torn paper.
My apartment became a sanctuary and a prison. The days bled into one another, measured not in hours but in the number of times I replayed every mistake, every word, every missed signal. I was tracing fault lines, trying to pinpoint the exact moment the earthquake began, as if understanding the geology of the disaster could somehow reverse it. It couldn’t. It only left me more buried in the rubble.
One morning, the sun—a pale, indifferent disc in the sky—sliced through my dusty blinds. I was making tea, a ritual I clung to with the desperation of a drowning sailor clutching a piece of driftwood. My hands reached for my favorite cup, one my grandmother had given me years ago. It was a simple ceramic thing, the colour of a winter sky, but it was perfect in its imperfection. A thin, jagged crack ran down one side—the result of a clumsy moment in the kitchen a year prior.
Instead of throwing it away, I had learned the Japanese art of kintsugi. I had carefully mended the break with lacquer and dusted it with fine gold powder. The crack was no longer an injury to be hidden; it was a shimmering, golden river that made the cup more beautiful, more unique, than it had ever been before.
As my fingers traced the raised, golden line, something inside me shifted. It was not a thunderclap of revelation, but a quiet, seismic tremor. A realignment.
My finger moved from the golden seam of the cup to the silvery crescent on my knee. The texture was different, but the story was the same. A line of breakage. A line of repair. A line that testified to the fact that something had been broken, yes, but it had also held. It had endured.
The fog in my mind began to thin, just a little.
What if my grief, my heartbreak, my profound sense of loss—what if these weren't just wounds? What if they were maps?
This new thought was terrifying and strangely liberating. I had been trying to erase the lines, to smooth over the broken terrain and pretend it was never damaged. I wanted to be the person I was before. But she was gone. The old maps were useless because the landscape itself had irrevocably changed.
Who was Goh Ling Yong now? The name felt foreign, a label for a person I no longer recognized. I was a cartographer standing at the edge of an unknown continent, and the only tools I had were the scars themselves.
Each pang of loneliness was a coordinate. Each wave of regret, a contour line marking a steep emotional drop. The memories that made my breath catch in my throat were not just ghosts to be exorcised; they were landmarks, points of interest on this new, terrifying terrain of my own heart. To ignore them was to remain lost. To trace them… well, to trace them was to begin the work of charting a way forward.
I looked around my quiet apartment. The unwashed coffee mug in the sink was no longer just a symbol of absence. It was a coastal town, a point of departure. The empty side of the bed wasn’t a void; it was the Great Plains, a vast and open space waiting to be explored.
This wasn’t about healing in the way people meant it—a return to a previous, unbroken state. That was impossible. This was about integration. It was the kintsugi of the soul: acknowledging the breaks, not as flaws, but as integral parts of a new, more resilient history. The gold doesn’t hide the crack; it illuminates it. It says, here is where I broke, and here is where I became stronger, more beautiful.
I finished my tea, the warmth of the mended cup spreading through my hands. For the first time in a long time, I didn't feel the crushing weight of what was lost. Instead, I felt the faint, thrilling pull of discovery. The journey ahead would be arduous. There were deserts of sorrow and forests of doubt to cross. There would be storms. There would be days I would surely lose my way.
But I had my first landmark. This quiet, life-altering realization.
I was learning to read the landscape of my own resilience, one scar at a time. The map is not the destination. It is not a promise of a safe or easy passage. It is simply the beginning of the way home, a way back to myself. And for now, that is enough.
Connect with Goh Ling Yong
Follow for more insights and updates:
🔗 X (Twitter)
🔗 Instagram
🔗 LinkedIn
🔗 YouTube
🔗 Soundcloud
🔗 Pinterest
Thank you for reading! If you found this helpful, please share it with others.
📖 Read on Medium
This article was originally published on Medium. You can also read it there:
If you enjoyed this article, please consider giving it a clap on Medium and following for more content!