Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

To make up for it, I let them form a new image of me. It’s been a constant struggle. 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.”

would be hard to live with your family’s disappointment.

My first impression of her was that she was likely to borrow money from me and never pay me back.

My shift to a value system in which I actually had a life had, in fact, set me on a path to a bleak future: Now I was throwing my life away, just spinning my wheels and keeping busy with no real direction or purpose.

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. The three become inseparable.

What’s written here are fragments from the first semester of sophomore year, the period from July 1988 to February 1989. After the wild boar barreled through the pasture gates and returned to the wild, was it a boar who’d suffered a concussion?

Its amnesia was so severe that it struggled to remember what it had said just a second earlier.

When I was twenty, these two entered my orbit, and like every other nebula adrift, soon strayed from its center. Yet they came to represent something very important to me. And what was that? The answer is simple: beauty.

I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions, to the point where I had no idea who I was anymore. I was crying out for help, but no one seemed to hear me. I couldn’t imagine my future. I kept waiting for my old world to come back and lift me out of this silent depression. Every morning I’d wake up and see the sun, and cry knowing that today would be more of the same, that the old world was gone forever. It was like, this is how things are now. Welcome to cold, hard reality.”

Otherwise, if you start thinking too much, you’ll suffocate. But once you become stronger than your surroundings, the absurdity will come to an end.”

The college lifestyle is about becoming independent, with no one else around to force you to do anything. So there’s this muck that hasn’t been dealt with, and because all your arrangements are loose now, you have no one to hold on to, which means you get sucked into the vacuum cleaner and tossed around in it. Your automatic response is to grab hold of something and pull yourself out.

After everything he’d gone through, he’d made the decision to assert his own will. I was the one who wanted him to live, but it wasn’t my choice to make. What connection did we have, really, that would justify my saying those words? I’ve thought about it, and I’d hate to but I’d do it all over again.”

“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.”

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.”

“But some desires, once formed, are impossible to fulfill, so they become frustrations instead. That’s the problem with going forth into new worlds.

Twenty. I was stuck in a rut and feeling hopeless. I couldn’t go on.

Life didn’t feel real. My reality was the occasional call from family, the twenty classes a week that kept me glued to a desk, the coming and going of nameless faces in the classroom, taking tests between the ringing of bells, sitting on a table in the student organization offices and goofing around, making plans to hang out with people from my classes.

I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, reminding myself that there was a place for me out there in those moments of happiness, even if I was a different person at home, someone who went to bed shit-faced.

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.

The layer of glass had grown thicker and harder to shatter. Life had drained me.

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 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.

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.

Who was the real me, then? It was an abstraction that hadn’t yet taken shape in my lifetime.

My college years were spent among people who were like oil in water, unable to form bonds.

One by one, those dearest to me had disappeared, and my memories, which I had so closely guarded, were ultimately of little consolation.

If I died, what difference would it make to the world? After all, no matter who I was, my death would be no more significant, nor would I be spared from lonely nights.

was sure that if she started talking to me, I would die.

used to be afraid of living, and now all I ever feel is the will to live.

Ever since I was little and started to learn what it meant to love, I never understood that I had to love me too—otherwise,

Life is so much more complicated than I ever imagined, and nothing is as easy as it seems.

And so I made up my mind that I would learn trust through a relationship in which lust had no part. First there had to be love and equality, so that the relationship would be built on pure trust.

‘Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.’

“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.

Man’s greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire.

“This journal from freshman year is the only thing I can give you. I’m not your everything anymore, so even though I want to love you now, all I can do is give you the old me, the one you once loved.”

But we’ve already become distant strangers. What

romantic love was not the only thing that brought an individual closer to others, nor was it a matter decided by fate.

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

was haunted by despair, pain, confusion, and loneliness, which threatened to drag me out of a world filled with the promise of the future and engulf me at any moment.

“According to you, all crocodiles should be preemptively thrown in jail, just in case you have a child who might become a crocodile. What if you suddenly woke up one day to find that you’d turned into a crocodile, what would you do then?”

On how to love well: Instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard.

In the end, it wasn’t love. We could love, and love would leave us, or we couldn’t love, and love wouldn’t leave us.

Passion alone is never enough. That was my biggest lesson. As a first year, as a third year, and even now, I could never give you stability. Love, however beautiful, always comes at a great cost to the future, don’t you think?

The best way for any relationship to end is with the sentiment I wish the best for you, and I am grateful for what we once had together.

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.