The Phosphorescence of Grief Part 1
The Phosphorescence of Grief Part 1
Discovering the light that lingers long after the loss.
By Goh Ling Yong
Grief, I’ve learned, has a physical weight. It’s not the dramatic, chest-clutching agony of cinema. It’s a dull, persistent pressure, like wearing a lead-lined coat in the humid Singaporean heat. For the first three months after my mother passed, I felt it most acutely in the silence of her flat. The air, once thick with the scent of ginger and sesame oil, the drone of the television playing her favourite Hokkien dramas, and the soft shuffle of her slippers on the linoleum, was now thin and empty. It was a vacuum that pulled at my lungs with every breath.
The silence was an entity. It clung to the floral-patterned curtains she’d refused to change and settled like a fine layer of dust on the porcelain teacup she used every morning. The cup, with its pattern of faded blue willows, still sat by the sink. I couldn’t bring myself to move it. To wash it would be to erase the last faint trace of her touch, the ghost of her fingerprints on its delicate handle. So it sat, a tiny monument to a life abruptly paused.
My days became a ritual of avoidance. I would go to her flat with the intention of sorting through her things, a task my relatives insisted was “necessary for closure.” But I would end up just sitting on her worn vinyl sofa, tracing the cracks in the upholstery with my finger and listening to the building breathe around me. The neighbour’s baby crying, the distant clatter of a wok, the groan of the old elevator—sounds she would have heard. Sounds that now felt like echoes in an empty concert hall.
It was during one of these aimless afternoons, while sifting through a wooden chest filled with old photo albums and stacks of letters tied with ribbon, that I found it. Tucked inside a tattered copy of a book I’d written years ago—she’d kept a first edition of my novel, a small, silly point of pride to see Goh Ling Yong printed on the spine on her bookshelf—was a postcard. It was faded, the corners softened with time. The picture was of a dark, indistinct coastline under a starry sky. On the back, in her elegant, sloping script, was a single line:
Tanjung Api. Where the sea remembers the light.
I didn't remember the postcard, but I remembered the story. It was one of her favourites, a tale she’d tell me when I was a boy, sick with a fever or just unable to sleep. She’d speak of a place, a secret beach she’d visited in her youth, where the water held a strange magic.
“Not like a lightbulb, ah boy,” she would say, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Not bright and loud. It’s a shy light. A quiet light. You have to move to wake it up. You splash your hand, and the water answers you with stars.”
I had always filed it away with her other stories—fantastical tales of mischievous forest spirits and the moon goddess who wove clouds from silver thread. It was part of her mythology, the beautiful folklore of my childhood. But the postcard was real. Tanjung Api was a real place.
A frantic search online revealed it was a small, almost forgotten fishing village on the east coast of Malaysia, a few hours’ drive from the border. It was known, according to a handful of old travel blogs, for its rare bioluminescent plankton. The phenomenon was seasonal, unpredictable, and dependent on the currents, the moon, and a dozen other variables. It was, the blogs warned, a fool’s errand to chase it.
But I was already a fool, lost in the geography of my own grief. A fool’s errand felt like the only logical next step.
The drive north was a blur of palm oil plantations and endless stretches of asphalt shimmering in the heat. The city’s noise receded, replaced by the hum of the engine and the melancholic playlist drifting from the car speakers. I was running, I knew that. But it felt less like running away from her absence and more like running towards a part of her I had never known—the young woman who had seen a sea of stars and carried that memory for a lifetime.
Tanjung Api was even smaller than I’d imagined. A single dusty road, a handful of wooden houses on stilts, and a jetty where a few colourful fishing boats bobbed lazily. The guesthouse was a simple affair run by an old man with skin like tanned leather and eyes that held the patient calm of the sea. He nodded slowly when I asked about the glowing water.
“Sometimes it comes, sometimes no,” he said, handing me a key. “The sea has its own moods. You cannot force it.”
For two days, I waited. I walked the long, empty beach, the sand white and soft as flour. The water was a placid turquoise during the day, a sheet of polished obsidian at night. I watched the fishermen mend their nets, their hands moving with an ancient, unhurried rhythm. I ate grilled fish and rice at the single open-air stall, listening to the cadence of a language I barely understood.
The lead coat of my grief felt heavier here. The quiet of the village was different from the silence of my mother’s flat. Her silence was an absence, a void where sound used to be. This quiet was a presence. It was ancient and vast, full of the rustle of wind in the casuarina trees and the ceaseless murmur of the waves. It offered no distraction, no escape. It held a mirror up to the hollowness inside me.
On the third night, I almost gave up. The sky was moonless and overcast, a blanket of impenetrable black. Disappointment, cold and sharp, settled in my stomach. The trip had been a mistake, a desperate clutch at a memory that wasn't even mine. I had come all this way only to find an ordinary sea, an ordinary darkness. My mother’s story was just that—a story.
I stood at the water’s edge, the waves sighing as they lapped at my ankles. I felt a profound loneliness, a sense of being utterly adrift. I was about to turn back when a sudden impulse, born of frustration and a flicker of childish defiance, made me kick at the water.
And then I saw it.
For a split second, the splash was illuminated from within. Not a flash, but a soft, ethereal bloom of turquoise light, like a dusting of emerald glitter. It vanished as quickly as it appeared.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I held my breath, still, disbelieving. Was it a trick of the eye? I took a hesitant step forward, deeper into the water, and kicked again, gently this time.
The sea answered. A swirling cloud of pale blue light erupted around my foot, a silent, liquid firework. I laughed, a raw, choked sound I hadn't made in months. I walked deeper, up to my waist, and swept my hands through the water. With every movement, I painted streaks of light into the darkness. Liquid constellations swirled around my arms, dripping from my fingertips like captured stars.
I wasn’t just observing it; I was a part of it. My movement, my disturbance of the calm, was the very thing that ignited the glow. The plankton, I knew from my reading, luminesced as a defense mechanism, a flash of brilliance to startle predators. A light born from agitation.
Standing there, waist-deep in a galaxy of my own making, the metaphor crashed over me with the force of a wave. This was it. This was the secret she had tried to tell me.
Grief was the darkness. The vast, overwhelming, moonless night. I had been standing on the shore, staring into it, feeling its crushing weight, its suffocating emptiness. I thought the darkness was the whole story.
But I was wrong. The light—her love, her memory, her stories—it was all still there. It hadn’t vanished. It was simply dormant, invisible in the blinding normalcy of daylight. To see it, I had to be in the dark. To activate it, I had to move. I had to wade into the sorrow, stir the stillness, and engage with the pain.
The memories I had been avoiding—the sorting of her clothes, the sound of her laughter, the sting of her absence—they weren't just sources of pain. They were the disturbances that could make the light appear. Each pang of remembrance was a ripple that woke up the phosphorescence.
The darkness didn’t extinguish the light; it was the reason I could see it at all.
I stayed in the water for what felt like hours, my arms and legs tracing shimmering patterns, each movement a conversation with the sea, with her. The glow wasn’t warm. It didn’t chase away the cold of the water or the chill of my loss. It didn't offer easy comfort or false promises. It was just… there. A quiet, miraculous, and achingly beautiful truth.
It was the phosphorescence of grief, a quiet and defiant glow that promised not an end to the darkness, but a way to navigate through it. A light that lingers, long after the sun has gone.
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