The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 1 by Goh Ling Yong
The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 1
by Goh Ling Yong
How the smallest doubts can reshape the bedrock of what we believe to be true
It began with the weight of a stone in my hand.
Not a metaphorical stone, but a real one. Flat and grey, worn smooth by a thousand years of lapping water. It was the perfect skipping stone, and the memory it held was just as perfect, just as smooth. I was six years old, standing at the edge of the MacRitchie Reservoir, the water a placid sheet of jade under the humid afternoon sky. My father’s hand, large and warm, covered my own, guiding my wrist in the sharp, sideways flick.
“Like this, Ling,” he’d said, his voice a low, steady rumble that I felt more than heard. “It’s not about strength. It’s about the angle. You have to trust the water will hold it.”
And I did. I trusted him. The stone left my fingers, kissed the surface once, twice, three times, a series of expanding silver rings before it finally surrendered to the depths. The quiet pride on his face, a rare, unfiltered smile that reached his eyes, became a foundational memory. It was the memory of a father’s gentle strength, of simple physics as a form of magic, of a world that was knowable and kind.
This memory was not just a recollection; it was a load-bearing wall in the architecture of my soul. It was the certainty I returned to when life felt chaotic and unkind. My father was a man of quiet consistency, a bedrock of unwavering calm in the turbulent sea of my childhood. That afternoon by the water was the cornerstone of this belief. It was immutable.
Or so I thought.
Decades later, I found myself in the attic of my grandmother’s house, a space thick with the scent of camphor wood and time. My father had passed two years prior, and my grandmother, now navigating the quiet landscape of her nineties, had finally allowed us to sort through the archives of our family’s life, stored in dusty cardboard boxes and forgotten suitcases.
The air was still and heavy, each sunbeam cutting through the gloom a spotlight on a universe of dancing dust motes. I was surrounded by ghosts—faded cheongsams, a child’s worn leather shoe, stacks of letters tied with fraying ribbon. My task was the photographs, a daunting archaeology of smiles and moments I’d never witnessed.
I found the box labelled ‘78 – ‘85 in a corner, sealed with yellowed tape. As I pried it open, the musty exhale of captured decades filled my lungs. There they were, the glossy, square-format ghosts of my childhood. There was me with a missing front tooth, grinning into the camera. My mother, her hair in a stylish perm, holding my baby sister.
And then I saw it. The photograph from the reservoir.
The world seemed to shrink to the four white-bordered edges of that image. The details were exactly as I remembered: the familiar treeline, the placid water, my father’s light blue short-sleeved shirt. I was there, a small, gangly child in shorts, my arm outstretched mid-throw.
But it was his face that made the air in my lungs turn to ice.
In my memory, his face was lit with that gentle, patient smile. It was the anchor of the entire scene. In the photograph, his expression was… something else entirely. It was tight, strained. There was a deep furrow between his brows, and his mouth was a thin, hard line. He wasn't looking at me with pride. He was looking past me, at something far away, his eyes holding a profound and impenetrable sadness. A weariness that seemed to sag the very air around him.
There was no joy in that picture. None at all.
I sat back on the dusty floorboards, the photograph trembling in my hand. It felt like a forgery, a cruel trick of the light. This can’t be right, I thought. My mind raced, trying to reconcile the two realities. Perhaps this was a different day. Perhaps this was a moment before or after the perfect skip.
But the light was the same. The clothes were the same. The angle of the sun casting a long shadow from the casuarina tree was identical to the one painted in my mind.
The image in my hand was the fact. My memory was the fiction.
That single photograph was the first hairline fracture in the bedrock. In the days that followed, it was all I could think about. The dissonance was a low hum beneath the surface of my daily life. It was like discovering that the signature on a masterpiece was a fake; the painting is still beautiful, but you can no longer see it the same way.
My father, the man of quiet certainty, was suddenly a stranger. If I had manufactured the joy in our most foundational memory, what other parts of my past were carefully curated edits? What other emotions had I airbrushed away to fit the narrative I needed?
Belief is a strange and fragile thing. We think of it as a conscious choice, a decision to have faith in a god, in a person, in ourselves. But the most powerful beliefs are the ones we don’t even know we have. They are the quiet certainties that form the invisible scaffolding of our identity. My father was a happy, steady man. My childhood was safe. I was loved unconditionally. These are not thoughts; they are axioms, the self-evident truths upon which we build a life.
What happens when an axiom is proven false? The entire structure shudders.
I began to look at other old photographs, but with new, suspicious eyes. I was no longer looking for nostalgia; I was a detective searching for clues, for the truth hidden in the grain of the image. I saw the same tension in his jaw in a photo from a family Chinese New Year gathering. I saw that same distant, haunted look in his eyes in a picture from my fifth birthday party, even as he held the knife over the cake with me.
The images were like sonar pings, mapping a vast, hidden geography of a man I never truly knew. He wasn’t a bedrock. He was a man weathering a storm, and I, his child, had been too small to see the waves crashing over him. I had only ever seen the lighthouse, the steady beam he projected to guide me safely to shore. I had mistaken the light for the man himself.
My name is Goh Ling Yong, and I am a storyteller. I build worlds from words, from the carefully chosen details of memory and imagination. My entire life, my career, is predicated on the idea that I can distinguish truth from fiction. Yet here was undeniable proof that the most important story I had ever told—the story of my own past—was at least partially a fabrication. Who was the author of that story? Was it the hopeful child, desperate for a perfect father? Or was it the man himself, a masterful performer protecting his family from his own private sorrow?
The erosion had begun. A single photograph, a small seed of doubt, had taken root in the foundation of my identity. It was growing, its tendrils pushing through the certainties I held most dear, splitting them open one by one. The quiet, solid ground I had stood on my entire life was beginning to feel like sand.
And I had the sinking feeling that this was just the beginning. I was standing at the edge of a truth I wasn't sure I was ready to face, looking down into the murky water where the stone had sunk, and realizing I had no idea what lay hidden in the depths.
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