Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

She spoke timidly, not because she wasn’t supposed to have such feelings but because she was telling me about them. Because femininity meant having to hide one’s true feelings.

All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man’s greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.

So what if these were just kids’ problems? Like hitting a patch of broken glass while biking, they could leave you fragile, and unable to speak.

At nineteen years and eleven months old, I’d invested a single coin, and the significance of this act was extraordinary. It was like the moment when a crawling baby learned how to stand up and take that very first step. I was in need, and so I called someone.

(Though I couldn’t define what I was, I knew what I wasn’t.)

There was an unspoken understanding that we would never cross over into the reality of each other’s lives, and our friendship took on a profound weight because of it. Careful to limit our interactions to chance encounters, we felt free to show affection and to speak whatever was on our minds, and those moments contained the makings of a great friendship.

Life is a process of awakening by degrees, in depth and in scope. At its most profound moments, you experience wholeness.

Home was where this squabbling old couple lived, and I was obligated to watch TV with them every so often. That’s all there was to it! In fact, after being tricked into leaving, I eventually stopped going back.”

Your neediness comes out inadvertently. You never exercise that part of yourself, so of course you’re not conscious of it. You’re just overly independent. Why not let yourself be needy once in a while?” “Where do I go to find that part of me? I forgot how to rely on other people ages ago!” she said.