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when it came down to it, I spent more time getting to know my way around the supermarket next door than I did getting comfortable in my own skin.
Within a year, the two of us would come to cherish our ambiguous rapport, at once intimate and unfamiliar, and tempered by moments of silent confrontation.
A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence. And the world keeps turning as if nothing had happened. The forced smiles on the faces of the lucky ones say it all: It’s either this, or getting stabbed in the chest with a bayonet, getting raped, dragging yourself onto the highway overpass, or checking into a mental institution. No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its
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All I know is that I was forced into a corner, and so I violated myself in order to ward off the threat of being violated.
“Ever since I started to wise up, my family’s been perpetually disappointed in me. Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn’t, I’d have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal. I’ve been trying really hard to get over my resentment. It’s caused them no small amount of pain,”
I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence. And using those would be like retreating before the battle’s even begun.”
“Resisting death. That’s what it comes down to. It’s like you’re on autopilot: No matter how much you hate life, your body doggedly resists death. Even other people aren’t allowed to die. You still try to stop them.” Meng Sheng scoffed. “What a joke!”
What is the human race, anyway, but a multitude of outlets for desires? There’s no suppressing the truths that arise from our experiences. Desires teach us lessons, and we have to go forth into the new worlds that we construct for ourselves.” Chu Kuang’s voice trembled. “When you can’t, that’s when you die.”
My life was extraordinarily lacking in all sense of reality, as if I were watching a different me playing various characters within a mirage. I wanted to be kicked out into reality so badly. . . .
Shui Ling was the only thing I had that was real. That year, my attic bedroom on Tingzhou Road became like a coffin in which I lay awake at night, painfully alone. She was the only one I’d been close to, and now there was no place where my reality converged with the outside world.
(Though I couldn’t define what I was, I knew what I wasn’t.) I was shown the limits, and being confined within a set of walls tormented me and drained me of life, for the real me spanned multitudes, stretching far beyond the bounds of normality encircling ninety percent of the human race. 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.
Who was the real me, then? It was an abstraction that hadn’t yet taken shape in my lifetime.
But there was no escaping separation, which was left to the mercy of fate. One by one, those dearest to me had disappeared, and my memories, which I had so closely guarded, were ultimately of little consolation. My thoughts were awry. Separation awaited regardless of which way I turned, ready to reduce me to a baby chick shivering in the rain.
God knows how much I’d drunk in the two years I lived alone, but it was clear I’d been having one long, silent cry. I simply hadn’t thought of it that way before.
I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights.
I once said you were so happy that it made me feel lonely. But the truth is, I was so hardened by pain that you couldn’t touch me. Relying on only a lover’s intuition, the way a blind man reads a cluster of braille, you reached for me, but your touch was painful, and it broke me down a little more every time. You were like acid on my limestone, unaware of how hardened I was.
My aching desires, born of a hunger for love, sent tremors through my badly starved body. Having once tasted that sustenance, I’m reduced to a living death without it, tainted or not.
“But Meng Sheng, every time I fight my way out, the outside world just blocks my path again. It never gets better. I’m constantly on the border of life and death, waiting for something to come along and push me over the edge.”
‘Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.’
“It scares me, and I don’t know where this is heading. Sometimes I imagine myself walking over the edge of the bridge and into the river. Then I snap out of it and hurry to the other end of the bridge so I can be with the special person in my life at the moment. “If no one fills that role, I’ll keep drifting in that fog. “What problems have I ever faced in my life? There’s a void I can’t get away from no matter how I try: The void is inside me.
Desire and torment were two opposing forces constantly chafing me, inside and out.
I was a prisoner of my own nature, and one with no recourse.
“I remember back in high school, we were a bunch of misfits, always having fun. There was something going on every day. We were part of a community. Now life’s all about being tied down by a man. Falling in love is all there is to do, and there’s no going back.
