The Half-Life of a Promise Part 1
The Half-Life of a Promise Part 1
What remains when the words we live by begin to fade.
By Goh Ling Yong
A promise doesn’t shatter. It’s not like glass, a sudden, sharp explosion that leaves you bleeding but free. A promise decays. It has a half-life, a slow, inexorable process of disintegration that happens in the quiet moments, in the space between your breaths. You don’t even notice it’s happening until you look down one day and realize you’re holding nothing but radioactive dust, the ghost of an element that once defined your entire world.
For me, that element was forged in the smell of old paper and sweet, decaying glue.
My father’s bookstore, Yong’s Books & Bindings, is not a place of grand literature. It’s a repository of second-hand stories, a quiet sanctuary tucked away in a Tiong Bahru shophouse, where the floorboards have groaned under the weight of browsers for fifty years. The air is thick with the ghosts of a thousand narratives, and in the late afternoon, golden light filters through the dusty windows, illuminating motes of paper fibre dancing like tiny, forgotten spirits.
The promise was made in a room that smelled of antiseptic and fear, the opposite of this place. My father, his hands—usually so strong, so deft with a needle and thread, so gentle with a fragile spine—lay still on the starched white sheets. His voice, a low rumble I had navigated my entire life by, was a rasp.
“The store, Ling Yong,” he’d whispered, his eyes fixing on mine. “It’s not just paper. It’s memory. It’s our story. Don’t let it end.”
I was twenty-two, a boy with a head full of poetry and a heart full of unwritten novels. But in that sterile, beeping room, my own stories felt like frivolous things. His story, the one built of brick and mortar and the tangible weight of bound books, felt like the only one that mattered.
So I said the words. “I promise, Pa. I’ll take care of it.”
The words became my architecture. I built my life around them, brick by dutiful brick. I learned the scritch-scratch of the old cash register, the precise pressure needed to operate the antique book press in the back room. I memorized the labyrinthine shelving system my father had created, a map known only to him and, now, to me. I learned the names of the regulars—the old uncle who only bought war histories, the young woman who sought out faded copies of Virginia Woolf, the quiet student who would sit for hours in the corner, breathing in the silence.
For years, that was enough. The routine was a comfort, a continuation of his rhythm. I told myself I was honouring him. I told myself this was a noble life, a quiet life of purpose. I was a keeper of memories, a custodian of stories. It sounded beautiful when I framed it that way.
But the half-life had already begun.
It started in the ledger. A thick, leather-bound book with my father’s neat, architectural script filling the first two-thirds. His entries were precise, clean columns of dates, titles, and prices. My entries, which began on a starkly empty page in the back, were a scrawl. But the real decay was happening in the margins.
In the white space beside the numbers, I started writing. A snippet of overheard conversation. A description of the way the rain slanted against the window. A line of dialogue for a character who lived only in my head. At first, they were small rebellions, pencil marks I could easily erase. Then they became bolder, inked in with the same pen I used to log the sale of a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.
My own stories were leaking out, staining the sacred text of my promise.
The bookstore, once a sanctuary, began to feel like a beautiful cage. The scent of old paper, once a comfort, started to smell like decay. The quiet, once peaceful, felt like a void. I was a ghost haunting my own life, performing the duties of a man I had promised to be, while the real me—the writer, the dreamer—was slowly suffocating under the weight of a thousand other people’s words.
One rainy Tuesday, the kind of afternoon that smudges the edges of the world into a watercolour grey, Mrs. Lim came in. She was one of my father’s oldest customers, a tiny woman with a spine as straight as a new book’s. She shuffled over to the counter, her umbrella dripping a small puddle onto the floor.
“Ah, Ling Yong,” she said, her voice a papery rustle. “It is good to see you here. Still holding the fort.” She patted my hand, her skin cool and dry. “Your father, he would be so proud. You are a good son.”
Her words were meant as a kindness, a balm. But they landed like stones. A good son. The phrase echoed in the quiet store long after she’d left with her copy of a classic Chinese novel. Was that what I was? Or was I just a faithful impersonator? The pride she spoke of felt like a borrowed coat, one that was two sizes too big and smelled of someone else’s life.
That evening, after I had locked the heavy wooden door, I didn’t go home. I walked to the back room, the heart of the bindery. My father’s tools lay exactly where he’d left them: awls and bone folders, spools of linen thread, pots of hardened glue. The great cast-iron book press stood in the corner like a silent, sleeping giant. This was his sanctuary, the place where he didn’t just sell stories—he saved them. He would take a broken, falling-apart book and, with a surgeon’s patience, give it a new life.
I ran my hand over the cool, scarred wood of his worktable. My fingers traced the grooves and nicks, each one a testament to a book saved, a memory preserved. My father’s hands were calloused, strong, mapped with the fine lines of his craft. I looked at my own. The only callus was on my middle finger, a hard little bump from the pressure of holding a pen. My fingertips were stained with blue ink.
And that’s when I felt the final, definitive shift. The last atom of the old promise splitting apart, releasing a wave of terrifying, clarifying energy.
The promise I’d made wasn’t about the four walls of this store. It wasn’t about the ledger, or the inventory, or the endless cycle of buying and selling. My father, a man who spent his life surrounded by the infinite possibilities of the written word, could never have intended for me to live a life that was a tribute, a past-tense existence. The promise, I realized, was about the stories themselves. It’s not just paper. It’s memory. It’s our story. Don’t let it end.
He wasn’t asking me to be a curator of his life. He was asking me to continue the tradition of storytelling.
I had been trying to preserve his story, freezing it in time like an insect in amber. But stories aren’t meant to be preserved. They are meant to be told. To be broken open, reimagined, and breathed into new life. I had been so focused on maintaining the vessel that I had forgotten the spirit it was meant to contain.
The silence of the back room was different now. It was no longer a void. It was a space waiting to be filled. The weight on my chest, the one I’d carried for a decade, didn’t vanish, but it transformed. It was no longer the dead weight of obligation, but the grounding, heavy presence of legacy—a foundation upon which I could finally build something of my own.
I walked back to the front counter, to the open ledger. Beside the column of yesterday’s sales, there was a phrase I had scribbled: The half-life of a promise.
I picked up my pen. My father’s ledger lay on my left, a closed book of his finished accounts. My own worn notebook lay on my right. I opened it to a fresh page. The rain had softened to a gentle patter against the glass. The streetlights cast long, watery shadows into the shop, making the shelves of books look like sleeping giants, dreaming of the worlds they held inside.
For the first time in ten years, I wasn’t just a keeper of stories. I was ready to write one. And I knew, with a certainty that was both heartbreaking and exhilarating, that this was how the promise was always meant to be kept.
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