A Ringing Silence

PAST — 24 APRIL 2019

I met Judah Chong at a rave in my second year in university. He caught my eye, and on this night in particular, a little too literally. Someone had upended what seemed to be a whole vat of glitter onto him, and he sparkled as he jumped to the pulsing music. It was so ironic that it was almost obnoxious—he was incandescent in every sense of the word. 

Judah Chong, Farquhar University’s golden boy. 294 for PSLE at twelve, 4 for O’s and Distinction for Higher Chinese at sixteen, 90 rank points for A’s at eighteen, now majoring in Psychology, projected to graduate with first-class honours. 

Judah Chong came from old money—and a lot of it. His family lived in a bungalow in the heart of Orchard. They ticked off the five “C’s” of the Singapore Dream—cash, car, country club membership, credit card, and condominium—like they were a job application (at least according to the rumours I’d heard). The name Chong opened doors to every country club in Singapore. Cash flowed like imported water: precious but taken for granted. Cars? Three of them were kept shiny and pristine within the premises of their bungalow. Oh, and they didn’t own a condo, but that was okay. They owned enough property in Marina Bay to house an orphanage, and flashed around platinum credit cards like million-dollar smiles. Within the school halls, the name Judah Chong was whispered like a legend. I’d heard stories about him all my life, so you’d think he was as half as impressive as they made him out to be. 

When I finally saw him up close that night at the university rave though, I realized something no reverent rumour could prepare me for. Judah Chong was impossibly and alarmingly… human.

He was yelling something over the music when I bumped into him, my drink sloshing halfway down his sleeve. I shouted a muffled apology, but he just laughed, teeth bright in the strobe lights, and yelled, “Don’t worry, this shirt was already ruined by the glitter. You’re just completing the look.”

I laughed too, mostly out of shock. I’d expected him to be aloof, maybe even smug. But he was… kind. Or at least he was good at pretending to be kind, which in that moment felt like the same thing.

We danced. It was chaotic and graceless, the kind of dancing that happens only in the dark heat of a crowded floor. Every time the bass dropped, he flung his arms out like he could catch the music midair. I was pulled into his orbit without realizing it. He didn’t ask for my name—he just called me “Comet” because, he said, “the shimmer on my cheek looked like a trail of stardust.”

The next morning I woke up nursing a hangover and ringing ears. My phone lit up beside me the minute I was awake, and an onslaught of messages from my roommate flooded my inbox. I scrolled down with a yawn, and then froze immediately. 

It can’t be.

I realized that my phone was open to a chat with Judah.

When had I given him my number? I thought in a panic. Surely not last night, in a drunken stupor? Surely not. Surely not. 

With my heart in my mouth, I clicked on the chat. 

Judah: Comet?  

Judah: … You’re not real, are you?

PAST — 20 JULY 2019

I was seventeen in 2016, the year my mother died. After her death, I had a hard time pulling myself back together. Some days, my limbs had felt too heavy to drag out of bed. There were mornings when my body would just shut down and refuse to move an inch. There were nights where I would lay motionless for hours, blinking at the ceiling, too hollow even to cry. I soon returned home from the university dorm. My father was out on most days after my mother’s death, handling all the funeral matters. To my shame, it was my fourteen year-old younger sister Celine who spoon-fed me bites of porridge and coaxed me into the shower after I spent days unable to do so. She was the one who cradled my head in her lap while whispering soft nothings, patted my back, and sang hushed lullabies to me when I should have been the one who did all that for her. 

My mother had always been the anchor, the one person who made the world feel survivable. In my mind, the role of the comforter belonged to her and only her. No matter how hard I tried on most days, I just couldn’t fight the darkness that had eclipsed my soul after her death. But there were better days, on some days. Those were few and far between. In the years to follow, I lingered in the afterglow of the better days, hoping it would tide me through the harder ones. 

Now, it has been three full years since my mother died, and three months since the night of the rave. 

It was one of those better days today, and it was also summer break, so I slipped out of my room in the middle of the night, limbs stiff from disuse. Silently, I put on my shoes and ran to the beach. Staying near the East meant that I could run to the beach as often as I liked, even in the middle of the night, and especially so. The black sky was illuminated by the glow of a thousand stars, which reflected on the glassy indigo sea.

There was one particular tree by the beach, an ancient gnarly thing, with low-hanging branches that I liked to curl up on. I found it when I was fifteen. 

That was also the age my mother had been diagnosed. The age I had stopped being able to fall asleep. The age I had began sneaking out to the beach at night, curling up on the tree branches to write. The age, when, thinking no one would ever find the spot, I had tucked my diary into a notch on the side of the tree. 

Most pages in my diary were messy. They were half-finished thoughts, thoughts that I couldn't say out loud to anyone or myself. There were also pages in my diary where I wrote about mundane things, about my life and my daily happenings. And there were also the pages where I imagined what would happen if I disappeared quietly beneath the waves one night, tied a noose around my neck, or took three bottles of painkillers.

Those thoughts made a strange creature of me. I wrote in my diary because sometimes, writing was the only way to scream without making a sound. 

That night though, I didn’t plan to write. I just needed to feel the wood pressing against my legs, to hear the sound of the tide sloshing at the shore, to breathe in all the humid salt air. I slipped out of my Bata sneakers and climbed the tree in my socks, the bark rough underneath my skin. A cloudy darkness hung low over the skyline like a shroud, filling the air with the earthy scent of rain. 

I didn’t hear him coming until I was already curled into the crook of the branch and he was standing below me. 

“Comet?”

At first, I thought I had imagined it. Imagine the voice and the name. There was only one person who called me that. No one else called me that. I peered down with my heart thudding in my chest, and there he was. Judah Chong. He wasn’t covered in glitter this time, but he stood there in his FBT shorts and an old VJC shirt, his bare feet shoved into sandals and his car keys in hand. His hair was soft, messy, like he’d run here too. It took me by surprise that the rich boy of Farquhar deigned to wear such simple clothing and come to such a simple place. 

“Why— What are you doing here?” I asked. 

“I could ask you the same.” He stepped closer, squinting up at me between the branches. “Didn’t think I’d find you perched on a tree like some kind of… philosophical bird.”

I wanted to smile. I couldn’t. “How did you know I was here?”

Judah shrugged. “Hell if I know.” 

He didn’t ask to join me on the branches. He just ambled around the tree, like he was looking for something, and then, without warning, he plopped down on the sand beneath me. When I looked down, he was playing with the sand, picking up a handful and letting it drain slowly through his fingers with calm precision. I thought that maybe he would make some deep philosophical metaphor comparing sand to time, but he just stayed silent. For a long while. 

Eventually, I asked, “Why are you really here?”

He hesitated. 

Then, raw and simple: “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

Well, that made two of us. 

I climbed down carefully, landing with a soft thud next to him. We sat hugging our knees and didn’t say anything after that. At some point, Judah produced a lukewarm can of A&W and handed it to me without a word. I took it. The silence between us stretched out, boundless and silent, carrying words neither of us wanted to say out loud but needed to hear. We sat like that for hours and hours. 

Later that night, when we parted ways, he just said, “Same time next time, maybe?”

He never came back to the beach. Never texted again. 

But against my better judgement, I waited. For him. 

PAST — 13 AUGUST 2019 

It was a custom at Farquhar University that raves happened every Friday, and it was also unofficially sanctioned by the university as a way to keep us on campus and off the streets. At the same time (contrary to my good-girl reputation), I began attending more of them. This was solely at the behest of my roommate, Denise. 

“You need to get out more, Ames!” She would often exclaim this with her hands flying around her head. “Socialise. Be a social butterfly. Stop being a… a cocoon. A moth.” 

In the darkness of night while I laid on my stiff mattress, I pondered this and concluded that Denise was right. I was a moth, drawn to anything that burned. 

I only agreed to go to the raves for two different reasons. Firstly, Denise was trying her best to include me and I did not want her to feel upset over me, and secondly, I heard that the raves had alcohol, and I had reasons not to buy my own. These reasons included my good grades and full scholarship. I was not the kind of girl you wanted to catch slipping out of a 7-Eleven with a bottle of cheap gin. 

So, on one Friday night, I walked into the pulsing blur of strobe lights and machine-generated smoke of a rave, wearing a little black dress and my heart on my sleeve. 

I immediately made a beeline for the liquor table. I didn’t expect much, maybe a few sad cans of Tiger, but the rave had a full-on liquor buffet. Whiskey, vodka, gin, tequila. Even Baileys, for some ungodly reason. It looked like someone had looted a duty-free store and decided to celebrate with intensity. 

“Booze table courtesy of Judah Chong! Halle-fucking-lujah!” A clearly drunk guy crowed this next to my ear, holding up a bottle of Jameson like it was the Holy Grail. I quickly ducked away from him and poured myself a whiskey and Coke—more the former than the latter—and leaned against a wall to drink in peace. I managed to avoid the majority of the inebriated student population this way while still being close to the booze table for quick refills. 

Hours passed by in a blurry haze. I lost track of time. At some point, the whiskey ran out. I had a sneaking suspicion I was responsible for that, but I shamelessly decided that I needed the booze badly and soon switched to beer instead. For someone who was definitely a lightweight, I was pushing it. But I was surprised that I hadn’t completely fallen apart just yet. The pounding of the bass and synth reverberated off the whitewashed pillars of the hall. I closed my eyes and made myself relax, becoming one with the vibrations, swallowing beer like my life depended on it. 

Halfway through my third beer, I thought I heard my name called out in the din. It was probably Denise with her boyfriend in tow, coming to tell me that she wouldn’t be returning to our shared room tonight. I armed myself with nonchalance, but instead, turned to face Judah Chong. 

“Comet? It is you,” he said, his eyes impeccably wide.

Like that night at the beach, his voice was quiet, but still somehow audible over the roar of the crowd. He did look… decent though, unlike the last two times I had talked to him. He wasn’t covered in glitter this time, nor was he in the FBT shorts. Tonight, he wore a faded blue button-down with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows and a pair of long brown pants. 

“That’s not my name,” I said, squinting my eyes. 

“I know.” 

“It’s Amelia.” 

“I know.” 

I could smell the whiskey on his breath, and, stupidly, through a haze of inebriation, I felt a surge of relief that I hadn’t single-handedly depleted the supply of whiskey at the table by myself. I clutched my beer tightly through sweaty palms. 

“What were you doing that night at the beach?” I had been aiming for a conversational tone, but realized too late that it wound up being too accusational. 

“I needed to take a drive. Just to clear my head. And the next thing I knew, I was at the beach,” came the candid response. “And you? What were you doing there?”

My stomach twisted at the thought of how my diary, with all those intimate words, was still stashed into that notch in the ancient tree. I thought back to all those sleepless nights, how I couldn’t sleep at home after my mother’s death anymore. How I too, as a last resort, had found myself at the beach. Just to clear my head. How I thought I’d found a kindred spirit, by some serendipitous twist of fate. How I was disappointed when he never showed up again. Never texted again. 

“You didn’t come back.” The words escaped me before I could rein them in. 

Oh God, was this the time for drunken confessions and false accusations? 

I momentarily regretted the whiskey for how it had loosened up my lips. 

“I know,” Judah replied.

Those two excruciatingly frustrating words. But it was an acknowledgement. An admission. 

Not an apology. 

“I waited,” I said. “For a long time.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

Suddenly, a flush of uncontrolled indignation ran through my veins like ice water. “So that’s it? No explanation?” 

“I didn’t know what to say to you,” he said. He looked ashamed. “You were… real. And I wasn’t ready for that realness.” 

“Is that how it is? You ghost people who are ‘real’?” My hands moved on their own accord, making bunny ears that threatened to undercut the gravity of the situation. 

“No,” he said, and his voice was quiet. Ashamed. “I just don’t normally meet them.” 

My heart leapt—before I tamped down the fluttering with pride and cowardice. “Save it,” I said. “I came here to drink whiskey. Alone. Not to talk to people who leave.” My head was spinning, and my words were slightly slurred and more catty than I had ever had them in my life. 

He didn’t protest. Didn’t chase me. He just stood there while I stumbled out, the booze finally catching up to me.

Later, I woke up in my dorm room, mouth dry, head splitting. Looking around, I saw a figure next to me. 

“Denise?” I rasped. “What the fuck— Why are you here?” 

But it wasn’t Denise.

It was Judah, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my bed.

“I wanted to make sure you got back safe,” he said.

He stayed. Through all the vomiting. Through the haze. Something flashed in my mind. He had held my hair, fed me sips of 100-Plus, and had adjusted my pillows before I fell soundlessly into a deep sleep. And all that time, he had said nothing stupid, but also nothing special. 

But… he stayed.

After that, I realised something. He was always present, but never all at once. It was as if he didn’t fully exist unless I looked at him. Right at him. 

PAST — 20 OCTOBER 2019

Three meetings—two at raves and one by the beach—turned into many more. After that incident, I knew I had forgiven him. We met for lunch often, walked to lectures together, and read poetry together at midnight. By October, we’d seen each other drunk and sick, raw and ridiculous—the way only laughing at some lame joke together could make us. 

What began as thin ice slowly crystallised into something real. Fragile, but real. Judah came over to my room on nights Denise was out. We would lay with my head in his lap, sharing a bottle of cheap wine together and stories about our childhoods like secrets. Under the moon, we talked all night about everything under the sun. We talked about poetry and politics, but never about the things that we couldn’t name. 

We moved like twin leaves—beautiful, but always drifting. We were drawn to each other by the same hunger to find the meaning of art, of something bigger than ourselves. We stayed up until 3 a.m. reading poetry and dissecting it like something sacred. We also smoked on the roof, our feet dangling into the dark, the both of us quoting Plath and Dazai and talking about the things we didn’t know how to say out loud just yet. 

Slowly but surely, I let him in. He learned why I resorted to drinking, but never about the haunting nights that felt like unescapable darkness. I learned about his loneliness, but never about the mundanity gilding his golden birdcage. His presence stopped feeling temporary. We shed our polished selves slowly, deliberately, like fruit stripped of rind—sweet and messy. And when I looked at him now, I didn’t see the picture-perfect golden boy—just Judah. Unguarded, unfinished, real. I told him things I hadn’t even told myself with words. With Judah, it was easy. He always listened so well that it was easy to forget he rarely offered anything back in return.

Once, I mentioned the diary entries stashed in that old tree by the beach, hoping that he would ask to read them. 

He didn’t. 

Sometimes, I wondered if he saw me in the same way I saw him. But I never asked. I was too afraid of the answer.

PRESENT — 21 AUGUST 2025 

Graduate from university, get a job, get married, and have a child. 

That’s how things are expected to go in Singapore. Well, in most places in the world anyways. For some people, this rings true. All those acquaintances I had collected in secondary school and university—everyone except Denise and Judah, who were my only real friends—were now posting photos of glittering diamond and sapphire rings on their fingers, their captions filled with hashtags and promises.

But these milestones loom ahead of me like deadlines I’m struggling to meet. No matter how many times I ring Denise, whispering my fears into the quiet of her receiver, no matter how many times she comes over bearing bottles of nail polish and tubs of ice cream, I still find myself stuck, stranded, and marooned on the shore of a life I’m supposed to want, but don’t quite find appealing. 

Because, even though Judah and I had taken it further than those nights in the Farquhar University dorm, had explored each other’s second-deepest fears and insecurities, and, eventually, each other’s bodies, we were something not to be named. There seemed to be no label for us. We were not quite nothing, but not quite everything to each other. Not yet. 

Maybe after six years together, you start expecting a ring. 

But only because everyone expects you to. 

***

One night, he held it out to me and asked me to marry him. His eyes were sincere. 

It was wrought gold, gleaming in the candlelight, and I knew it’d fit perfectly on my ring finger, because Judah was Judah. Attentive, careful, sensitive. He’d been that way even since our very first night in the dorm. He never changed. But I never found myself needing him, really, not in the way I should have. 

On those nights when my mind became a battleground—when sleep slipped through my fingers and the world seemed to cave in on me, burying me alive—I didn’t reach for Judah. I reached for a bottle of cheap vodka and Celine’s voice over the phone, soothing me with half-baked grounding techniques from a therapist I’d stopped seeing ages ago, telling me to find three things I could see, two things I could hear, and one thing I could touch. 

Living without my mother. Without my father. Without Celine beside me in the bunk bed we once shared. I’d cleared those hurdles, stumbled through the wreckage, and made it to the other side—scarred, but standing.

I wasn’t unhappy. But I wasn’t happy, either.

And I knew Judah wasn’t the answer to that.

***

It couldn’t have been helped, not really.

He had thrown a party at his mansion on the hill one Friday night, invited all the old family friends and their children and their pedigree dogs and cats, and then dropped to one knee in front of all of them. In front of me. 

And it couldn’t have been helped, either, of how I reacted. 

Even though I didn’t answer, he slipped the ring onto my finger anyways—a perfect fit, of course. But I slid it off, tucked it back into its velvet red box, and closed the lid with a finality that silenced the room. Then I gently covered his fingers over it. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. 

Then, I turned around, picked up my skirt, and ran out the front door. 

The night air hit me like a gasp. Cold, sharp, alive. I didn’t stop running until I reached the bottom of the hill, slingbacks clicking uselessly behind me until I kicked them off and left them on the pavement like shed skin.

No one followed. Of course they didn’t.

I walked barefoot the rest of the way to the nearby MRT station, my best dress gathering dirt on its hem, my thoughts louder than the night wind. Judah’s face kept replaying in my head. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t even surprised. His face had just been broken in that quiet, composed way of his, like he’d always known this was coming, but had hoped I might prove him wrong.

Maybe I’d hoped that too. Once. 

I thought back to the very first time we’d met—at a party that reeked of sweat and cheap booze, nothing like the one I’d just fled, with trays of champagne flutes gleaming under glittering chandeliers, the light bouncing off pristine marble floors. And I wondered if the Judah that I’d met back then, messy and raw and unfiltered, could ever have imagined where we would end up today—or even imagined if I would still be that same girl at all.

Reaching the next MRT station, I got off the train, but my bare feet attracted strangers’ stares. I ignored them all. What should have been the most important day of my life had turned into the dull monotony of yet another. If it were a dream, Judah would come running after me like Prince Charming running after Cinderella. Because if the shoe fit, we could be together. 

The truth was, we’d fit together like puzzle pieces long ago. We just never stopped to check if we were a part of the same picture.

Walking to a halt, I stopped in front of the flat that Judah and I had shared since it all began. Fresh out of Farquhar, we’d rented a four-room unit in the East—my choice, because he’d insisted on keeping me close to my family. At the time, I took it as a gesture of love, or at least friendship, and I never questioned his sincerity. But now, standing alone beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of the HDB corridor, I couldn’t help but wonder what else I had missed—so completely, so utterly. 

My dress felt tight around my ribs. I sank to the floor by the window and didn’t move for a long time, watching the dark, hearing nothing but the low chugging of the MRT train in the darkness beyond. I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured it: Amelia Tay, the madwoman. Running away from Judah fucking Chong, heir to Westerton Group and its sister company, who lived in a mansion in the heart of fucking Orchard, who owned more money than most families did in three generations. Ameila Tay, who had only apologized, before leaving Judah Chong crestfallen on one knee, ring box still curled in his hand. 

My phone buzzed several times over the night—Judah, probably, or Denise, if she’d caught wind about it—but I couldn’t bring myself to look.

I wasn’t sad. Not exactly. But I somehow had the feeling that I’d just run away from a life I was never meant to walk into.

And strangely, I didn’t feel upset. 

Judah didn’t come home to the flat that night. Or maybe the mansion had finally reclaimed him, becoming his home again, the place he turned to for comfort.

Without me.

***

Saturday morning came, and at 10.57 a.m., I went out for groceries and felt the glances—those that tried to look away too quickly, and those that lingered just long enough. Judah had become the tragic prince in their narrative, and I the girl who ran away from a fairytale ending.

“Stupid girl. She doesn’t know what she did. Must’ve panicked.” 

“She wasn’t in her right mind for sure. Between you and me, I always knew that she was a little… off.” 

“I mean, six years… What was she waiting for?! That poor boy.” 

The voices spoke in hushed whispers, like their pity was something holy. I tossed their words over my shoulder and walked past the cereal aisle like a ghost, wondering how many of them had already imagined my future for me: alone and regretful, calling Judah years from now with a brittle voice and a softer heart.

But I wasn’t sorry.

The days after the proposal unfolded like a slow-motion sequence I couldn’t quite escape from. Judah retreated back into the mansion, his family’s sprawling estate that smelled like polished wood and old money. He vanished from my life with a quiet finality, a ghost retreating behind gilded gates and perfectly trimmed hedges. I never tried to talk to him, and he never tried to get me back. 

I moved out of our flat in the East and moved in with Celine. I surrounded myself with the scent of stale coffee and half-finished notebooks, trying to stitch together the fragments of myself with words and therapy sessions and the patient kindness of Denise. The town’s whispers buzzed like flies, but I paid them no mind. Their words had only ever been about the rumors and the gossip, and had never conceived where the real me began. 

The truth was, I never ran from Judah because I didn’t love him. 

I ran because I loved myself more.

PRESENT — 7 SEPTEMBER 2025

The first time I ever wrote in my tree-bound diary, I wondered what the meaning of life was. What was the meaning of love, if no one stayed? 

But then I realised: sometimes, love doesn't stay. 

It’s knowing when it’s time to go. To let go. 

I didn’t marry Judah Chong. I didn’t become a trophy wife in a marble house with crystal glasses and a life lined in gold. But that was okay. 

I had survived. 

And the silence after all the ringing was enough. For me. 

 Cecy Grace is an 18 year-old Singaporean who likes reading, sleeping, and writing.