Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

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 responsibility ages ago. All that you know is that you’ve been crucified for something, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life feeling like no one and nothing will help you, that you’re in it alone. Your individual circumstances, which separate you from everyone else, will keep you behind bars for life.

I should be allowed to see you in the future. Because in the past, you told me that after we broke up, if could I take it for a month, then I’d be able to deal with it. But I’ve already taken it for a month, and I’m suffering all the same.

So what can I say? Was I angry? Regretful? Filled with self-loathing? I had to get over my feelings and move on already. It was like drowning in a vat of black tar, the victim of a slow death by suffocation. Best not to let out so much as a fart, since you’re not only trapped with your own stink but the tar might overflow.

“Doesn’t Hsia Yü have a poem called ‘Sweet Revenge’? I only mention it because I thought you might know it. It’s like the title says. Because love goes hand in hand with hatred, and because there’s hatred, you’re going to fight, and when you fight, you see that there’s love.

Once your sexual frustration reaches a certain point, if you don’t either fulfill or rid yourself of your desires, you’re going to find yourself deep in the abyss of meaninglessness. And there’s no easy way out. In fact, you’ll cling even more desperately to the object of your fixation, and when you do, your desires will turn against themselves in full force.

Not only the people I’d forged close bonds with but almost everyone I knew from college appeared or disappeared in the blink of an eye. No one could be counted on to show up anywhere. Our relationships were about as tight as those between one drifting nebula and another.

Nowadays I hardly ever think about her, but of course, she’s in my dreams all the time. The dream goes on until I say, ‘Let’s not fight anymore.’ But she never responds. She just walks out, leaving me standing there.”

You don’t know what death is really like and don’t want to find out, so part of you is resisting death. And that part of you spoke up, that’s all. You didn’t want to let death in. Everyone has the same response,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with that!” “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.”

Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.

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,

That’s where I was after eighteen months. I didn’t want to see or talk to her, and I’d no longer allow her to set foot in my world. The paradox, of course, was that my love for her would grow. Her corpse would remain in a sarcophagus where I kept her closer than I could in reality. And I continued believing in that unchanging world, which I was at peace with. It was as if Shui Ling simply went on living her life, and it made no difference whatsoever to me.

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

Though you showed me that you loved me, I assumed it was because you’d never experienced a man’s love, that you didn’t know the social disapproval we’d face, and that you couldn’t tell I was seriously fucked in the head. I thought that in the end, you’d still need a man, that you were just going through a confused phase, and that sooner or later, I’d be dumped so that you could move on to the next shiny new thing.

The two of us had a certain rapport. 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.

“What is there to be sorry about? It’s like leaving out the single stroke of a pen. All you have to do is change he to she, and it’s the same.

Vowing never to let me go again, she made me promise over and over that no matter how bad things became, I would never abandon her. Yet I was not allowed to see her, nor was I allowed to be a part of her life. My loitering outside the lecture hall was met with reproach. Any trace of me in her everyday life was perceived as a threat.

“You’re into someone else. You’re not into me.” “I’m not into you, silly. I love you.” Out at sea, the cobalt blue lights of a distant patrol boat were flashing. Water under the bridge, as they say. There was a growing cacophony inside my head. “I feel so close to you right now because of our past together. But you’re acting strange and distant toward me,” Shui Ling said.

Sometimes I just know my love is for you, and that’s when I want to run back to you and give it all to you now. I want to love you well. But we’ve already become distant strangers. What else am I supposed to do? I have to rely on old memories in order to get along with the new you. I can’t even tell you how much you’ve changed.”

There’s no way I can imagine spending my life with you. You need to go out and find that person in life who’s going to love you!” The grief that had been long dormant in her now awakened, her crying descended into wailing. I could feel the pain she’d been going through. “I can’t find that person. I can’t find that person you’re talking about who’s going to love me. I only have you.” “You can. I know you can. You’re wonderful. . . .”

I don’t want to be close to you again. Our fighting knows no end. I want you to shatter the illusions I created, and go out and love someone else. Don’t love too much but don’t fail to love, either. Love prudently. Love realistically, just enough to treat someone well. Though you don’t love me anymore, relationship or not, I want you to be well now and always. I want you to love someone else, even if it hurts me. Part of me has been secretly hoping that good things do last forever, but it’s time to renounce that hope. I looked across the water, and as my tears fell, I told myself: “You can’t hold on to a beautiful thing forever—not in your memory, not even if you keep loving it. If you tried, it would only die in your possession. Beauty must be free to run its course.” I decided to free you from my heart in a gesture that is nothing short of poignant, for beauty belongs to no one and must be relinquished to the eternal.

Or maybe, just maybe, she wanted to love me, but what she gave me was a love with too much pride. That’s the kind of person she was. As far as intimacy went, she no longer had any desires or fantasies. What she had instead were crippling fears. She not only realized that she couldn’t afford to pay the price but she refused to. All of her energy went toward upholding the responsibilities of another intimate relationship, and so she refused to take up the same kind of romantic involvement elsewhere.

We’d signed a perverse unspoken contract. Due to some greater good, we were each unwilling to part with the other. At some point, I developed the savage conviction that she would never truly love me. Or perhaps it was the sheer intensity of my love that caused me to fiercely resist her. At my weakest and neediest moments, I avoided her. Otherwise, she’d start messing with me. During those times, I told myself that the problem was in me. I could no longer balance her out as I once had. I was backsliding. She cut me off completely to punish me, and so I stopped craving intimacy. It was all based on a frightening dysfunction: lack of trust.

Love should be a beautiful experience. If it can’t be saved, then I don’t want to love anymore.

I no longer think of myself as an unhappy person—quite the opposite. Admitting that I have problems is a mode of optimism, since every problem has a solution. Unhappiness is a lot like bad weather: It’s out of your control. So if I encounter a problem that even death can’t solve, I shouldn’t care whether I’m happy or unhappy, thereby negating both the problem and the problem of a problem. And that is where happiness begins.