One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.

The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a “soundless music”. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

Rebecca woke up with her knees hurting and her fingers ice-cold, and the specifics of her life returned to her as the dream disappeared: weekend, hotel room, Baguio, memory, memory, memory.

But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.

Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn’t heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.

Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.

But what little we did know, we brandished wildly like cavemen’s clubs, slinging out stuff we felt tasted good. That was as intricate as ourgame plan ever was—to make food that tasted good.

Mongkol, poor Mongkol, shedding tears.Thinking of his smiling, comical face, and his dreams of sending his son to university, I could only lower my head in silence.And the night continued, cold and dark, the wind frozen beyond the mountains.

In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography.

I’d thought there’d be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway—silently, suddenly.