Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

instantly transforming their loss into a lie.

torrential

kindred

It’s like a series of roadside warning signs.

The December fog is sealed off behind glass.

enshrouding

draconian

lay my head—which by then was spilling over with thoughts—down

repentant

not only her charms but how it felt to be deprived of them.

supplanted

appear like the answer to a dying man’s prayers—roses

I reached for those roses, and for a new life, only to discover a glass wall.

suffused

drain across my face like yolk.

split apart

like pieces of a landslide.

in those eighteen months of being cut off from the object of my desire, I was a blind man fallen into the ocean. I spiraled downward, deeper and deeper inside myself, until I sank to the seabed and slipped into a sinister cave in which Shui Ling’s beckoning was the only sound.

Shui Ling was the only thing I had that was real. That year, my attic bedroom on Tingzhou Road became like a coffin in which I lay awake at night, painfully alone. She was the only one I’d been close to, and now there was no place where my reality converged with the outside world. The look in her eyes, the sound of her voice, snatches of our conversations—those sensory impressions formed a leech that attached itself to me and started sucking my blood. I sealed the leech in a plastic bag and kept it at a distance.

No matter who I was, no matter how anyone else saw me, no matter whether I knew who I was, somewhere on this planet there was someone who’d completely accept me, who’d been trying to figure me out all along, who genuinely loved me.

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

short-lived as a rainbow.

achievement on par with landing on the moon, then floating in space with zero gravity.

You were like acid on my limestone, unaware of how hardened I was.

It’s like taking a bucket of black dye and adding other colors to it, hoping to change black into a different color. You can try, but you’ll never succeed.

She’d been harboring her love for me like an oyster cultivating a pearl.

It was like the removal of a parasite that had been lodged in my flesh. Though the experience would make me infinitely stronger, I also had to cry out in pain.