A plane roars overhead. 'I want to fly away,' she says, as we both watch the plane disappearing into amber clouds. 'Where do you want to go?' I ask. 'Anywhere,' she replies, 'anywhere away from here.'

Everyone has a secret place they dream of going to to escape the everyday. An alternate universe where time is suspended, and this place, this little secret place of yours, is the universe. I fly...

...and stare at the sun, golden yellow and smiling, but it does not burn my eyes. Its rays glimmer on the moving waters of the sea outstretched before me, tiny lights within the crests of the waves that blink on and off, on and off. The waves kiss the sand and then retreat with that soft rhythmic 'husshh, husshh' sound. 

I plunge into the clear turquoise sea, cool and deep and mercurial. I open my eyes and see cities of coral and sea turtles and schools of fish, darting about in formation like serpents. I swim further, never tiring, never needing to come up for air. I wriggle through a cave and glide through a kelp forest, and watch a manta ray spread its wings majestically above me. 

The sun is setting. So far in my life I have only ever seen the sun set once over the sea. It is now sinking, a gigantic flaming ball, infusing the sky and clouds around it with a brilliant orange. So low; I wonder if I could go touch it and scald my fingers. It's being half-hidden by the horizon now, and there's a shimmering orange path on the water leading to it. The last of it juts desperately - I am reminded of a phoenix dying within flames - and disappears, and the night is come.

A galaxy of stars. From nowhere appear bamboo poles staked into the sand and lit with fire, illuminating the night. Some tanned beautiful people have appeared on my island and are dancing capoeira, laughing. I lie happily on the sand and count the falling stars, the beat of jungle drums echoing in my ear. 

'Where do you want to go?'

'Wherever you want to take me.'

- Chungking Express

The funeral was held in a brightly-lit chapel on the cemetery grounds. It was a hushed, solemn affair as the priest read his sermon and the rest of us contemplated our own mortalities. 'Is this what life is about?' he questioned; I refrained from leaping out of my seat and shouting 'yes, yes it is'. I wonder what he dreamed of, in his sleep, as he exhaled his last breath. What vision, what realisation is there for one headed towards oblivion?

I did not cry.
I am not sad, now, until
One day I turn around
And he's not there.

The flowers are now in full-bloom, in preparation of dying. The leaves of the maple tree outside my window are beginning to curl and wither. Autumn has arrived already.

I tread carefully on the silver line painted by the moonlight.
A muffled cry, pleading eyes in a hazy room. An isolated satellite tracing a solitary orbit.

When one is not asked to stay, one understands it is time to slip away.

Ma Ma moved into the aged care centre last week. There was really no point in her living in the unit by herself; besides, now she was only a floor away from Ye Ye. When I visited I found her sitting in Ye Ye's room, motionless. She had just had a haircut - her hair, dyed an artificial deep brown, was cut short and sparse. We chatted a little until eventually there was nothing to say (how little the young and the elderly have in common) and we watched in silence as Ye Ye gradually closed his eyes and succumbed to sleep.

She wondered if I would like to see her room upstairs; I nodded. 'And perhaps you can help me move some of my things around,' she added. With one arthritic hand grasping the walking stick and another on my arm, I walked her - well, more like shuffled - to the lift and up a level. The room was very new and clean, but spartan. I went over to the window, brushed aside the soft cotton curtains and peered outside - white neon streetlamps, and the red tail-lights of a solitary car, driving away. 'Ma Ma your room is quite nice. Wow it's even got an in-built wardrobe.'

She wanted to change around some of the photos on the shelf. 'Your mum put that there but it's just some drawing that a student gave me. Could you replace it with the photos of you guys, over there in the cupboard?' I reached up and grabbed the drawing (a black and white sketch of a house) from the top shelf, and went over to the cupboard to get the ones she wanted - a framed yellowing photo of me as a kid, in a red tracksuit, sliding down a slippery dip; and a photo of my brother, sister and myself sitting on the couch, back when I had just started uni (god, look at my hair!). 'Ma Ma, what about this one?' I asked, holding a large gold-framed photo of her on her wedding day. 'Yes, put that one up too please,' she said.

I examined the black-and-white photo closely. There was Ma Ma, standing tall and resplendent in a full-length wedding gown. Her gloved hands clasped a small bouquet of flowers, her thick black hair was piled high, her dark staring eyes full of youth and vitality. I wonder what goes through her mind when she sees that photo, now that her hair is thin, her hands gnarled, her back bent and her eyes cloudy. I asked her how old she was in that picture; twenty-seven she replied with a chuckle. She would often say to me, back in my primary school days (when I procrastinated and watched cartoons instead of doing homework), that once 4 o'clock has passed, it never comes back again. I would always reply with such contempt (oh I was a brat!) that tomorrow it'll be 4 o'clock, and the day after, and the day after that too. Ah, nowhere was the truth more poignant, and prophetic, than now, clutching a photo of her in the prime of her life. I read somewhere once that photos steal the subject's soul; maybe there is some truth in it, after all.

An inexplicable sadness suddenly came over me, then. I thought of how Ma Ma used to take us to school in the morning, and babysit us afterwards, and her quaint little house on the hill, and the hot stuffy afternoons, and her cooking, and Coco Pops, and now, now she's in a nursing home, in a little room, old and shrunken and frail. Things are changing, fast and violent, and I am afraid.