The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 5 by Goh Ling Yong
There is a specific kind of silence that settles after a landslide. It is not the absence of noise, but the presence of a vast, humming emptiness where a mountain used to be. I feel it in the morning, when the light slants through the blinds and catches the dust motes dancing in the air. For a moment, the world is exactly as it was. Then, I remember.
The architecture of my soul has been rearranged. The load-bearing walls of belief, the ones I thought were bedrock, have crumbled into dust. And in the quiet aftermath, I am learning to walk through the ruins.
It’s been months since the tectonic shift, the slow erosion of a quiet certainty that finally gave way. There was no single, cataclysmic event. It was the drip of water on stone, the slow widening of a crack in the foundation. It was a thousand small questions I had learned to ignore, a hundred tiny hypocrisies I had papered over with faith and familiarity. Then, one day, the paper tore, and the wall was gone.
Now, ordinary moments have become strange, alien landscapes. I was making tea this morning, the familiar ritual of spooning leaves into a pot, the rush of boiling water. I held the warm ceramic mug in my hands and stared out the window at the angsana tree, its branches reaching for a sky I no longer knew how to name. The tea tasted of boiled water and dried leaves. It did not taste of comfort. It did not taste of home. It tasted only of itself, a fact stripped of all poetry.
I used to believe that the universe was a story, a narrative with a purpose, a beginning and an end. I believed my role was to find my place in its pages. The world was imbued with meaning, a secret language written in the flight of birds and the turning of seasons. My job was to listen, to decipher, to align myself with its grammar.
Now, the book is closed. The language is gone. The birds are just birds, driven by instinct and air currents. The seasons turn because the earth tilts on its axis. These facts are not cruel, but they are unadorned. They offer no consolation.
My friend, Mei, called last week. Her voice was a bridge back to the world I used to inhabit, full of the easy warmth of shared assumptions.
“Ling,” she said, her voice bright, “we’re having a gathering on Saturday. To celebrate the little things. You should come. We miss you.”
The little things. That used to be my creed. I built a career on it. I remember flipping through an old anthology, seeing my name in the contributors list—Goh Ling Yong, an author who finds the profound in the mundane. That person felt like a stranger now, a ghost from a past life. The little things don’t feel profound anymore. They feel… little. And I feel little with them.
“I’m not sure, Mei,” I’d said, the phone feeling heavy in my hand. “I’m not very good company right now.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s not about being good company. It’s about being together.”
That was the heart of it, wasn’t it? The certainty I’d lost wasn’t just a private, internal framework. It was a shared one. It was the invisible net that held a community together, the unspoken agreement that we were all climbing the same mountain, even if our paths were different. Now, I stood at the bottom, covered in its dust, watching them wave from a summit I could no longer see.
I did not go. Instead, I went for a walk. The park was teeming with life, a symphony of small, ordinary moments. A young couple argued quietly on a bench, their hands still intertwined. A child cried over a dropped ice cream, his grief immense and all-encompassing, until his mother knelt and wiped his tears, her love an equally immense and encompassing force. An old man sat, still as a statue, his face a mask of placid contentment as he watched the evening light filter through the leaves.
I used to look at scenes like this and see confirmation. See? my heart would say. It’s all here. Love. Loss. Resilience. Joy. It all means something.
Now, I saw only the mechanics of existence. The firing of neurons, the release of hormones, the biological imperative to connect and protect. I felt like a scientist who had dissected a butterfly, laying out its iridescent wings, its delicate antennae, its coiled proboscis. I knew every part of it, but I had lost the magic of its flight. I had traded wonder for knowledge, and it felt like a terrible bargain.
The true climax of any collapse is not the falling, but the moment you stand in the rubble and realize you have to start clearing it. Or perhaps, you don’t. Perhaps you simply learn to live in it.
My moment came on a Tuesday. The rain was falling in relentless sheets, drumming a frantic, chaotic rhythm on the roof. I was sitting at my desk, staring at a blank page, the cursor blinking like a patient, mocking eye. For weeks, I had been trying to write, trying to find the words to describe this new, silent world. But every sentence felt like a lie. Every metaphor felt hollow.
Frustration rose in me, hot and sharp. I felt a desperate, primal urge to break something, to match the chaos of the storm outside with an act of destruction of my own. My hands were shaking. I stood up, paced the room, my heart hammering against my ribs. The silence in my head was no longer empty; it was screaming.
And then, I just… stopped.
I stopped in the middle of my living room, the rain lashing against the windows, and I started to cry. It was not a gentle, cathartic weeping. It was a raw, guttural sob that tore its way up from a place I didn’t know I had. I sank to the floor, my body convulsing with the force of it.
I was not crying for the loss of a god or a grand narrative. I was crying for the loss of myself. The self who knew things. The self who had answers. The self who could look at a sunset and feel, with every fiber of her being, that it was a promise.
I cried for the easy comfort of certainty, for the warmth of a faith I had never realized was a blanket until I was left shivering in the cold. I cried for my own arrogance, for believing that my foundation was made of stone when it was only packed sand, waiting for the tide.
I cried until there was nothing left. Until I was just a body on the floor, my breath hitching in my chest, the rhythm of the rain slowing to a gentle patter.
And in that quiet, exhausted emptiness, something new stirred.
It was not a new belief. It was not an answer. It was a single, undeniable thought, small and fragile and ferociously real.
I am here.
I am here. On the floor. In this body. With this breath. The rain has stopped. The air smells of wet earth and ozone. My cheek is cold against the wooden floorboards.
These were not poetic observations. They were facts. Simple, unadorned, and solid. They were the first stones I could hold in my hand in this new landscape. They were not a mountain. They were not a foundation. But they were real.
I don’t know what comes next. The erosion of a quiet certainty is a slow, ongoing process. The landslide has passed, but the ground is still unstable. There will be more aftershocks.
But the silence that follows is changing. It is less of a void and more of a space. An opening. It’s the silence that waits for a seed to sprout.
This morning, I made tea again. I held the warm mug and looked out the window. The angsana tree was still just a tree. The sky was still just a sky. But as I watched, a small, yellow-breasted sunbird landed on a branch, preened its feathers, and then, for no reason I could decipher, it sang.
Its song was not a message. It was not a secret. It was not a sign.
It was just birdsong in the quiet morning air.
And for the first time in a long time, that was enough.
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