Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

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.

I devoured all kinds of books for tortured souls.

Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility—from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward. That system had already molded me into a flimsy, worthless shell. It drove my body to retreat into a self-loathing soul, and what’s even scarier is that nobody knew or seemed to recognize it.

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.

But as for what significance that glance held, it was as if my whole life had flashed before my eyes.

It was clear from that moment on, we’d never be equals. How could we, with me under the table, scrambling to summon a different me, the one she would worship and put on a pedestal?

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.

How can the world be this cruel? 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.

Didn’t understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn’t understand that she caused me suffering. Didn’t understand that love was like that.

Are you sinking into some corner of your melancholy? In my heart, I called out to you.

She was a vine extending one slender, delicate branch toward my window, hoping I was the sky, not knowing that on the other side, there was no shade, and not much sunshine, either.

To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.

She was the one mirror that I was willing to see my own self-pity in.

To be desired ought to be a happy thing, but could it be that you remain ignorant of the fact that the torch has been passed to you? The suffering that we, a chorus of Kobo Abes, have undergone is tremendous.