Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

realized I should leave behind some sort of record before my memories evaporated. I feared that otherwise it would be like waking from a dream, when the inventory of what had been bought and sold—and at what price—would be forever lost. It’s like a series of roadside warning signs. The one behind me says: DON’T BELIEVE THE FANTASY. The one ahead of me says: WIELD THE AX OF CRUELTY. One day it dawned on me as if I were writing my own name for the first time: Cruelty and mercy are one and the same. Existence in this world relegates good and evil to the exact same status. Cruelty and evil are only natural, and together they are endowed with half the power and half the utility in this world. It seems I’m going to have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of my own fate. Wielding the ax of cruelty against life, against myself, against others. It’s the rule of animal instinct, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics—and the axis of all four. And the comma that punctuated being twenty-two.

The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.

The whole world loves me, but what does it matter since I hate myself?

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.

Did you even consider me at all? Because my answer is: It’s not good for me. I used to think that I could seek refuge in you. Those two words—seek refuge—were what I really wanted to do. You’re the only person at this school I’m close to. It’s happened three times now that I’ve gotten depressed and needed to escape. Each time I ran from campus, clutching my backpack and hoping I wouldn’t bump into anyone I knew, and I found my way to your apartment. As I rang the buzzer, all I knew was that I needed to see you. But you were never there. The first time I was tired, so I sat down on the steps and stayed there. I was already a little closer to you. I could feel you there. Then I found the energy to go home. After that, I stopped ringing your buzzer. I just had to hang out on the steps for a while, and that was enough. Did you know these things? If you don’t want me to seek refuge in you, sorry my skin’s not thick enough to handle it. What’s wrong with that?

She closed her eyes. Tears fell from her eyelashes. Every last fiber in my body felt as if it were being twisted and wrung. I’d wrenched our relationship to the breaking point and watched it split apart. I know I made you suffer. I’ll never cut you off again. I spit out the words that were caught in my throat. She let out a laugh, and then, as if she’d finally been torn open, a cry of pain. To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.

I had to sacrifice the real, living, breathing her. To me, she represented beauty in its highest form. And I went and treated her like a piece of meat. It was a mess of my own making, the product of my own savagery and barbarism. But what else was I supposed to do? No matter what, Shui Ling, I’ll always feel your absence. From now on, for the rest of my life, I have to change my ways and pay the price for the crimes I committed as an eighteen-year-old. As long as I’m alive and able, I won’t stop talking about humanity and all of its fears.

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.”

Someday, when you meet someone who’s living in a prison, you can remember how I was once imprisoned by you. After you left, I was overflowing with love that nobody wanted. You left me standing in the cold, with only you in my heart and nowhere else to turn. I can’t say I never thought of running off with whoever was convenient. But I never did because everyone else seemed so inferior. I felt that if I let anyone else into my heart for even a second, it would sully the love we’d shared. I’d never be able to live with myself. I couldn’t hate you or stop loving you, and that was only the beginning. It was impossible to hate you, though I tried. I knew there was no hope of running away or winning you back, but I still waited right where you left me. I imagined there was a completely new you who met my needs, that my love was requited. That way, I was never lonely in a crowd. I was just another woman in love, lost in a daydream. My tragedy began when you left. I felt like a child abandoned by her father, facing a hard road ahead. My love has only grown stronger, leaving me helpless. Just like you predicted, I didn’t know what you were to me until it was too late. I wasn’t like you: I always knew it was love, that I should love while I could and prepare myself to no longer be able to love. Only I was confused by my attraction to you. The moment I experienced your tender side, I gave myself completely. That’s why it hurts so much that your cruel side took my love and never return...

That was how I started to see things. Or maybe this was the product of the schema that I’d long been using—unconsciously—to block out the outside world. That way of seeing had gotten me far in this world. But now everything I’d achieved in my first twenty-one years of life—connections I’d forged, status I’d earned, talent I’d nurtured, possessions I’d acquired, and traits I’d developed—were at the mercy of a death wish that negated it all. 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. Sweeping that other me into their arms, they led me in a dance within societal norms, along a trajectory based on a delusion. (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.

But the problem was the way I loved: It was the very cause of my pain.

No matter how loudly I sobbed, the sound was drowned out by the noise of passing cars. 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. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow. It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.

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 sense of self had begun to disintegrate, and so I had to flee. Still, you know nothing of how it transformed me, nor do you realize how I altered your destiny. For you, being in love with a woman is natural, the same as being in love with a man. You didn’t believe in unhappy endings, much less admit that misfortune lay ahead, awaiting you. So you took the agony in my eyes to be part of my tragic disposition, and as in any lopsided romance, you partook of the happiness.

During those six short months when there were feelings between us, I became a monster. That monster caressed you, its paws held you, and its maw pressed against you in a kiss. With its monster desires, it lusted after your body. It took in the adoration and admiration in your eyes, which reflected nothing of the monster’s shadow. The experience, every bit of it, brutally scathed me. I’m unworthy of loving you. I’ve struggled to find self-worth, but I can’t expel the monster’s consciousness still lurking beneath my skin. If my self-worth was already wounded, my experience with you only put salt in that wound. You opened a realm that exposed me. The deeper and harder I fell for you, the more grotesque I felt. The shackles that had been holding me down were removed. But in my mind, the monster’s face had taken over. Every night since the birth of this monster, I lay in horror, unable to sleep. I groaned in agony, a patient trapped in a slowly dying body.