Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

I’d always been surrounded by people who cared for me, but no matter how much they loved me, they couldn’t save me: It just wasn’t me. I never let others get too close and simply paraded a fake me that resembled their image of me.

There was no one I wanted to share my thoughts with. There was nothing I could do to lessen the pain, no source that I could pinpoint. Secretly, though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn’t have a whole lot going on.

God I wished I was dead. This woman had to be part of some hellish eternal recurrence.

My world is one of tainted sustenance. I love my own kind—womankind. From the moment my consciousness of love was born, there was no hope of cure. And those four words—no hope of cure—encapsulate my state of suffering to this day. My condition is one that will keep me in shackles for life.

“Why did you have to come back? I’d already found the perfect spot for you in my heart. Why did you have to ruin it? All I wanted was a way to love you for the rest of my life!”

“I know I treated you mean. But you were so intense. Don’t you know that? You turned my world upside down. I’m where I am now because you led me here. All of this is your doing. How could you have abandoned me and left me out in the cold?”

I put all the time and energy I had into finding closure, making sure that you’d never again be a part of my life. I wanted you to fade into the past so that I could mourn. So I gave myself a bloodletting, replaying hurtful words from our time together over and over in my heart. Our breakup was not the most beautiful memory, but this time, it was the best.

She had come to experience everyone as an intractable burden. Her worst nightmare was to be loved. That was why, at the core of her passion, there was fear. She had rejected love and taught herself to live without intimacy.

Even if she did accept my love, she didn’t process it or know what to do with it. Her only response was a passive guardedness that prompted me to commit more severe encroachments. In the end, things fell apart and she withdrew from me.

She let me give myself over completely, then prevented me from falling madly in love with her by forcing me to love her in a rational, controlled way. She didn’t want the soul-baring embrace of intimacy. She wanted to admire me from afar, and it was enough for her to know that I’d always be there. That distance partly served to help her make sense of me. She was so impervious that she couldn’t tell how much I needed her. Even if she could tell, she’d never be able to give me what I needed. Instead, she’d drop hints about how little she had to give. To make matters worse, she’d sometimes give me the exact opposite of what I needed, so that there was no point in expressing my needs. She constantly had the upper hand. That was her way of protecting herself from me—by giving herself an out—and protecting me from even greater pain.

Your expectations are too different from how I love, in that you have a lot of pride. You can only love someone who’s more arrogant and difficult than you, though you probably don’t see it that way.

“But when you decide to love someone, how do you keep thinking of commitment as a choice, when you’re closing yourself off to opportunities that might lead to even greater happiness? And if you continually demolish your old internal structures, then how can you preserve enough of yourself to keep the same relationship alive day after day?”